Crushed by exhaustion, you may dream of a competitor's head morphing into a Pokémon-like demon — and then open your eyes and still see it. The next day, you will quit the race.

To fill your queasy stomach during your third 112-mile bike ride, you will discover the best way to eat a sausage-and-egg sandwich: Shove it in your mouth and let it slowly dissolve.

After 500 miles on a bike, 10 in the water, and more than 100 on foot, it will make perfect sense to grab a branch and a broomstick in a desperate bid to propel yourself — like a giant mutant insect — the last 31 miles. It will not be enough. You will collapse on the road.

Seasick, miles into the swim, you will vomit. Twice. Neck cramps will attack so fiercely on the bike that your head will slump. You will go cross-eyed and nearly crash.

You will swear bugs are crawling over your face, even when they are not. The cracks in the road will form smiley faces. None of this is real — but it is 3 a.m., and you have dozens of miles still to run.

All that misery and more menaced the competitors who had decided, for their own unfathomable reasons, that a single Ironman race was not enough. They had entered an endurance event called the Virginia Quintuple Anvil Triathlon — five Ironman-length races, totaling 703 miles of swimming, biking, and running, over five days.

All the legs were done in confined loops (30 laps in a section of the lake, 101 laps of a more-than-5-mile course for the bike, and 75 laps of a nearly 2-mile course for the run) at Lake Anna State Park in Virginia's Spotsylvania County, earning the course the moniker "squirrel cage."

The competitors — several of whom have formed a tight, family-like circle, having seen one another often at these kinds of races — were a mishmash of the superfit and the merely fit, military veterans (including a couple of former commandos), driven professionals, and simple thrill seekers, who found plenty.

Most were middle-aged, most had grown children who would not miss them much in the long hours of training, and most had supportive spouses and family members — in some cases triathletes themselves.

Some of those family members came to watch their loved ones destroy their bodies, if not their minds, for nearly a week because...because...why? "If you have to ask," more than a few racers replied, "you will never know."

You may haveheard that idea expressed at, say, the regular old Ironman triathlon, which is normally considered the Mount Everest of the sport: a 2.4-mile swim, then a 112-mile bike ride, and then a marathon (26.2 miles) in the heat of Hawaii. If you could finish it, you were, well, an Ironman (or woman).

People began flocking to the challenge. Races popped up on every continent except Antarctica.

The first Ironman was in Hawaii in 1978, with 15 competitors. Today, there are 140 races to choose from, drawing 260,000 competitors.

But once you have swum 2.4 miles, biked 112 miles, and run 26.2 miles in a day, why stop there? As early as 1984, a double Ironman race was held in Alabama. And then a triple. And then a quintuple. And then a deca (10 Ironmans in 10 days) and a double deca, and you see where this is going.

Wayne Kurtz, who is considered the godfather of the so-called ultratriathletes, and seven others did 30 Ironman-length races in 30 days in Italy in 2013. He wrote about it in a book called Stronger Than Iron.

"With this kind of test," he wrote, "these athletes were not racing for money or fame but purely to discover what is possible in terms of endurance limits." How did it go? "I was hit by a car three times," Kurtz said in an interview. "It was a zoo. We're lucky nobody died."

One of the more popular races is the Quintuple Anvil, which grew to 16 competitors this year from seven in 2013, its inaugural year. Double and triple versions are held at the same time. (By the time you consider a quadruple, you might as well just do a quintuple. That is the mentality here.)

"Anvil" is a tongue-in-cheek spin on "Ironman," which is run by a large corporation fiercely protective of its trademark and not keen on letting other races use it. Competitors may choose one of two ways to mete out their self-flagellation: Do one Ironman-length triathlon a day for five days, abiding by a 17-hour cutoff, or do all of it continuously — a 12-mile swim, followed by a 560-mile bike ride and a 131-mile run — stretched out over 5½ days, broken up however you wish.

The 1-by-5 variant means you can get a longish night's sleep, but you have to get up for a 7 a.m. start every day — a fitness nut's Groundhog Day.

The continuous version usually involves a fair amount of sleep deprivation, in particular to get the long bike and run legs done. This is the fitness nut's Walking Dead: By the end, the mind is shot from exhaustion, and the legs and feet have taken so much punishment that hardly anybody is doing much running.

My own triathlon experience has been limited to a few "sprint" races of short distances, some Olympic-distance races (a swim of just under 1 mile, a 24-mile bike ride, and a 6.2-mile run) and one half-Ironman (1.2-mile swim, 56-mile ride, 13.1-mile run).

The half-Ironman, done in the tropical heat of Panama, left me staggering at the end and had me pretty sure that I had found my limit — and it wasn't happy to see me. Just beyond the finish line, there was an ice bath, which I felt like moving into permanently.

When I told this to Shanda Hill, who ended up one of the top finishers at the Anvil, she smiled and, with the evangelical fervor common among the racers, started pushing me to at least do an Ironman-length race. "It's all mental," Hill, 34, said, "and I am living proof."

By that, she meant that she had not devoted long hours to swimming, biking, or running. But she did spend a lot of time in the gym and was also fit from a youth of championship BMX racing, a pursuit that ended several years ago when she was hit by an SUV while riding a bike home.

She began running after that, moved up to ultramarathons, and before long was doing her first Ironman, in 2014. Then came a double race, and by her logic, if you are going to move up to a triple, you might as well just do the quintuple.

This was her fifth triathlon overall, and like many of the other athletes, she would insist that endurance triathlons had as much — if not more — to do with the limits of the mind as with those of the body.

Lisa Wei-Haas, who did a double, said, "Shorter triathlons are about pain. Endurance triathlons are about suffering. How much suffering can you take?"

Facedown on a cot, near midnight in the middle of the race, Will Turner had a massage therapist kneading his muscles, trying to coax some life into them. He was, at 58, an Ironman veteran who last year moved up to multiple-distance races by doing a double Ironman-length race.

He believes in big dreams, he said, and he dedicated his entry to his recently deceased mother. This race, the continuous Quintuple Anvil, would also be a test toward a bigger goal: 60 Ironman-length races, one every six days, when he turned 60. The test was not going well.

"I have been hanging out in the pain cave," he said.

Like other racers, Turner had a group of people attending to him, although as a resident of nearby Richmond, he had more than anybody else.

Limited medical assistance is permitted, too. A doctor and a nurse dispense ibuprofen, pop blisters when necessary, and even give shots of lidocaine to ailing tendons (a small dose that is meant to get a faltering competitor moving and does not last long).

To qualify, a competitor must have finished at least a double Ironman-length race, yet here was Jerome Libecki, 46, doing his first-ever triathlon. He had sort of slipped into the race — although he had done other endurance events, he'd needed a friend to persuade the race director to let him in.

His triathlon inexperience showed: About 300 miles into the bike leg, after a friend took a harder look at his bike, he realized he needed to shift into a higher gear.

By the "run" — for him and many others, it eventually slowed to a walk — Libecki was the one who hobbled on like a giant insect with makeshift crutches.

"This is the last thing I figured would happen," he said at 3 a.m., panting and sweating. But still he vowed to go on.

Even in thegrip of exhaustion, there was a thirst for competition. Libecki and Turner, in their stooped gaits, still eyed each other as they passed, if in a last-man-standing kind of way.

People race to win, after all. And as if the physical demands of such a contest were not enough, some resort to psychological warfare. They misinform one another about whether they intend to nap, or they press on when they see a rival catching a snooze. They burst into a sprint when they see another competitor walking. Some methodically plot when to give their all and when to hold back.

Dolph Hoch IV, 52, a former military sniper, won the one-per-day quintuple division in a time of 74 hours 54 minutes 17 seconds, beating five other competitors (including two who quit). Unlike the other racers, Hoch conserved enough energy to complete his Day 4 (14:25:04) and Day 5 (14:46:31) races faster than he had done Day 1 (14:59:21).

"The first day, I was getting lapped on the bike," he said after the race, his thighs now "screaming." "Fifth day I had the fastest split. They had no idea I was saving my spin." (In my estimation, he also won best food trick, as the one who let the sausage sandwich dissolve in his mouth.)

The most grinding competition, however, was between David Jepson and Johan Desmet.

It was not quite a Rocky-like spectacle, but with Jepson, 40, looking to be falling apart at times, it did take on that feeling. At a rest stop, he threw down his bike helmet in frustration over cramps that had left him unable to hold his head up and nearly led to a crash.

But with reassuring words from his wife, Jepson regained his footing on the run despite a multitude of maladies: a "golf ball–size" blood blister on his foot he eventually popped, a shin splint, ankle tendons so sore they needed to be stabilized by duct tape, and bruising and chafing on the bottoms of his feet that made every step searing. Running was not much of an option anymore.

Desmet, 49, who is Belgian and a marathon runner, kept up an efficient gait for a good amount of the run and rarely complained about his ordeal despite the blisters and sores on his feet. One of them, a race nurse concluded, was from the bite of an insect that had gotten inside his shoe.

"You're not drinking enough," interrupted his wife, Helene, who served as his only crew member, handing him water during a late-evening break.

"You always say that," he said, taking a sip. Helene was ready for the race to be over. And so was he. After six years of ultra-racing, he was planning to pursue other adventures. "It's a pretty selfish sport," Desmet said. "She's been putting up with this for close to seven years."

In the end, Jepson won the continuous division with a time of 104:47:39. Desmet, still on the course, realized the best he could do was second place.

"I am going to be first loser," he cracked.

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in The New York Times. Reprinted with permission.

My 9-year-old son plays flag football. He loves playing. I love watching him play. But he's now of the age where if he's going to keep playing, he needs to transition to tackle football.

And I just don't know what to think.

As the mother of three boys who, like their dad, love all things football, I find myself torn. Given the undeniable long-term effects of repeated blows to the head and body, I am mother bearishly opposed to my sons playing, or even glorifying professionals who excel at the sport.

But it's not that simple.

In this age of incessantly streaming devices, I love that there is an activity to play and to watch that binds my boys and family together. A part of me also relishes how the "hard knocks" nature of this particular activity chafes at the prevalent culture of coddled youngsters — and their helicopter parents. I know I'm not alone in seeing the benefits of a tough coach, team play, and well-honed lessons in how to fall and get back up. Reluctantly, I understand why my husband references his football coach, teammates, and success and failure on the field as the most formative, character-building experiences of his life.

I did not grow up in a football family. I attended an all-girls high school. And while I noted Super Bowl Sundays as an occasion to enjoy bowls of chips, dips, and entertaining commercials with my dad and brothers, football carried little weight in my life experience. Until, as the cliche goes, I met a guy. While we were dating up through when the kids were toddlers, however, Bill's passion for football remained a minor detail. Until I readily joined him in admiring the agility of our son as he raced a foam ball into our living room's end zone for hours.

"He's going to be an awesome wide receiver or some other noteworthy position," my husband would say, scooping our son up for a diaper change or feeding. I didn't even respond because the very idea of this baby in pads and a helmet sounded ludicrous, particularly when the most pressing victory at the time was getting him to sleep.

Ten years later, we have three boys who want nothing more than to run, catch, throw balls, score touchdowns, and watch them being made over and over again. Our youngest, a 9-year-old ESPN addict, can relay a Monday morning report on every NFL player and team and the prospects for that night's match-up.

As much as I rail against the sport's dangers, I look forward to a big game on a Sunday afternoon, bodies strewn across sofas around a plate of nachos. In between plays we catch up on our week: the travel, practices, homework, and tests that lie ahead. In a world that at times seems to do everything it can to pull families apart, this sport brings us together. And for that I am grateful.

But these days, you must be wary where you express this sentiment. Like any competitive profession, motherhood can be a cutthroat business. And where we live, a pro-football stance can be met with looks of dismay, suspicion, and self-righteous condemnation. A mother who sends her son out to play football — wow — has she not read the reports, seen the news coverage, pored over the scientific evidence? Does she read?

The other day, as a mom relayed how much she loves her sons' (grade 2 and 4) football coach and league, she quickly qualified her enthusiasm: "I'm from Wisconsin. We let our boys play tackle. … And they just love to play."

Even though I'm from Queens (and read), my boys love to play as well. While I may not be ready to don a cheerleading outfit and pledge my enthusiastic support, I understand the draw. As a former college athlete, I admire the physical, mental, and emotional prowess that practice and games entail. I appreciate the graceful arc of a well-thrown ball, the incredible athleticism involved in a diving catch, the remarkable agility required of the cut and run. As a mom, I relish the smiles, the high fives, the palpable pride and joy my sons feel for themselves and their teammates when they play.

But I know it's dangerous. I do, I do.

As an NFL doctor told Dr. Bennet Omalu, the man who first discovered CTE in the brain of Hall of Famer Mike Webster, "If 10 percent of mothers in this country would begin to perceive football as a dangerous sport, that is the end of football." But that's not quite right. All moms perceive the sport as dangerous. But I also don't know a single football mom who would support an end to the sport entirely.

Like so much of parenting, marriage — life — it's complicated. So let's discuss, debate, and consider all perspectives, even that of a 9-year-old boy — and his football-loving dad.

At approximately 12:47 a.m. on Nov. 3, 2016, in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, Kris Bryant threw a baseball to Anthony Rizzo.

In doing so, Bryant, Rizzo, and the rest of the Chicago Cubs proved that curses don't last forever. They live and then they die. And in this case, the cursed words "them Cubs, they ain't gonna win no more," uttered (allegedly) by a scorned tavern owner in 1945, were suddenly rendered meaningless. The Cubs had not won a National League pennant since the curse was bestowed, and hadn't won a World Series title since 1908, 108 years ago, a year for every stitch that there is in a baseball or feet there are between the foul ball poles at Chicago's Wrigley Field.

The Cubs' World Series victory required no sacrifices or appeals to the ghost of William Sianis (although there was likely plenty of lucky underwear and knocking on wood by Chicago fans). Indeed, despite our mortal efforts, once a curse has been bestowed, there is not much you can do but wait it out. Curses have power — the power to bring entire cities of people together, to give fans something to live for, to draw an audience of 40 million fans and onlookers who just want to witness a sliver of the magic that comes with breaking free of something 108 years in the making.

But shattering curses has consequences, too. And some of them are bad.

A sports curse is a special anointment, the mark that separates a truly damned franchise from the rest of the teams that are just regularly bad. Curses allow you to believe that there is something divine, or perhaps diabolical, behind your year-after-year disappointment and misery. You and yours alone have been singled out to endure this suffering; you can map your family history by the close calls of the home team and the utterances of "there's always next year."

Naturally, when that (finally!) ends, there is excitement, pyrotechnics, screaming, crying (there is so much crying in baseball), smashed cars, and smashed champagne bottles. But after the broken glass has been swept up the next day, in the early morning afterglow of the celebrations and the drinking and the fireworks, after even the presses have whirred out At Last! in big, bold letters across the top of the local paper, then you, suddenly, are indistinguishable from the rest. Occasional winners. Occasional losers. Curse-less.

Maybe it is the human love of narrative that makes the closure of curses so disappointing. Granted, they are not disappointing from the start — everything to love about baseball is in that electric moment when the ball zips nearly invisible from Bryant's hand to Rizzo's outstretched glove — but the aftermath is shutting a book. At some point, the W will be pulled down, only to be raised again another day. The cycle keeps going on. Winners win and lose, but what makes losers special is that they keep on losing. True losers never win. Until they do. Then they're just like all those other winners.

The Boston Red Sox know something about the mundanity that follows a broken curse. The team also had a World Series title dozens and dozens of years in the making, one that ended a drought of wins that had been strung together every year since 1919, when the team sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Blood was spilled (down Curt Schilling's ankle) and, the Bambino appeased, the 2004 Red Sox had a victory more than 80 years in the making.

We just so happen to be in a golden era of curse breaking; another team from Cleveland quenched a drought earlier this year. The Cavaliers took down the unstoppable Golden State Warriors and won the first professional sports title in Forest City in half a century. The Cleveland Indians would have been the icing on the cake of the city's broken curse, the one-two punch for long, long suffering fans. Instead, the burden of being the team with the longest time since a World Series win has been passed on to them.

But what, in the end, does a curse even mean? "There are no real curses. We know all that. Right? We know that," Ted Berg writes in his beautiful meditation on superstition, baseball, and being mortal. But that hesitation, the full pause before the question seeking affirmation, that is what baseball is about. The uncertainty. The hope, or possibly dread. The fact that all of this is out of our hands.

Because — at the end of the evening, after the lights are shut off in Cleveland's Progressive Field and everybody flies back to Chicago — there are still 29 teams that didn't win the World Series in 2016. That is where the story begins anew. The hard-luck Mariners who can't even make it to the playoffs, the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros and San Diego Padres, who have all been around since the 1960s and never won a title? Could there be a curse there?

The 2016 Cubs were the best team in baseball, and they deserved their win. But as powerful as this moment is, as strong as this fever, as bright as that grin on Bryant's face, it will fade. It will become one of a dozen other stories of perseverance and achievement and making baseball magic happen.

As for the Indians? They have been without a World Series title for 68 years. And that is a story worth being a part of for as long as it lasts.

The late commissioner of Major League Baseball, Bart Giamatti, a scholar of Renaissance English and former president of Yale University, wrote that baseball was a metaphor for life. The goal, he explained, was "to leave and return home." The journey around the bases, in which you are always alone, but must depend on others who provide both opportunities and risks, is completed only by coming back to where you started. In a season, of course, the journey is capped by the World Series, the ultimate completion of 162 regular season games and then playoffs.

The 2016 World Series victory of the Chicago Cubs — the team's first since 1908 — will be ranked as one of the greatest of all time. There have been better teams, such as the 1906 Cubs, who still hold the best season winning percentage, at .763, or the famed 1927 New York Yankees. There have been better World Series matchups, such as the one in 1991 between the Atlanta Braves and the Minnesota Twins, in which five games were decided by a single run, three went to extra innings, and four were won in the final at bat. There have been more dominant individual performances than those this year, such as Bill Mazerowski's legendary walk-off home run in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, or Jack Morris' 10-inning complete game shutout 1-0 win in Game 7 in 1991.

But there has perhaps never been a World Series like the one that concluded early Thursday morning in Cleveland. Never has the Series pitted two teams that had not won the championship for more than a half century. Cleveland's last World Series victory came in 1948. The Cubs hadn't even appeared in the World Series in 71 years. The "curse" of the Cubs, the century-plus-long championship drought, the memories of epic collapses in 1969 and 2003 — all of it added to drama that could not be dreamed up in Hollywood. The hopes and dreams of literally generations were riding on the contest, as men and women young and old talked about parents and grandparents (and great-grandparents) who had waited in vain for this moment. As a member of a family that has rooted for the Cubs for five generations, since my great-grandfather arrived in Chicago with his young family in 1910, I felt the history as keenly as anyone in the City of Big Shoulders.

Since the World Series was first played in 1903, only 38 have gone to Game 7. Of those, only five teams had come back from being down 3 games to 1 to win the crown, and only six teams had won Games 6 and 7 on the road. Last night, the Cubs became the sixth team to rally from a 3-1 deficit by winning three games in a row, and the seventh to win the last two games in the opponent's ball park. The Cubs' bats finally came alive in Game 6, after being shut out in Games 1 and 3. The penultimate game also saw Addison Russell become the second-youngest player to hit a grand slam in a World Series, after Mickey Mantle, as well as tie for the most RBIs, with six. And the incredible return of Kyle Schwarber, who blew out his knee in the second game of the season, had major reconstructive surgery, and yet came back after sitting out since April to rack up seven hits in the Series, including three last night, is a story of individual triumph almost unequaled in the annals of baseball.

As for Game 7: It will be remembered as one of the greatest in history, an amazingly emotional see-saw battle rarely seen in a championship-deciding game. Dexter Fowler became the first man to lead off a Game 7 with a home run. After jumping to a 5-1 lead behind the excellent pitching of Kyle Hendricks, the Cubs saw their margin narrowed to two on a wild pitch by Jon Lester, a starter (questionably) brought in to relieve Hendricks in the 5th inning. Indeed, the strategic battle between Cubs' manager Joe Maddon and Indians' skipper Terry Francona will be discussed for years, as each pulled their starting pitchers early, went to their bullpens, and all but exhausted their benches by putting in most of their available players.

Retiring Cubs catcher David Ross, playing in his final MLB game, added a solo home run to make it 6-3 Chicago. But as Cubs fans counted down the final six outs, the Indians roared back in the bottom of the 8th to tie it up, thanks largely to a two-run homer by Rajai Davis off of Chicago closer Aroldis Chapman, the hardest-throwing pitcher in baseball.

Then, after a scoreless 9th, the rains started, providing the rattled Cubs with what their fans will always believe was divine intervention, as a 17-minute rain delay allowed the young team to huddle for a group meeting, steady themselves, and prevent the type of classic collapse so well known to generations of Cubs fans.

In the top of the 10th inning, the Cubs played as though they had just taken the field, scoring two runs on solid hits by Series MVP Ben Zobrist and back-up catcher Miguel Montero, the third catcher used by Maddon that night. But the Indians refused to give up, and scored a run in the bottom of the 10th, to make it an 8-7 game. Finally, as literally the entire sports world and all its fans held their collective breath, Cubs relievers Carl Edwards, Jr. and Mike Montgomery recorded the final three outs to end the 4-hour, 28-minute marathon and bring the World Series championship to a city that last won it when Teddy Roosevelt was president.

The beauty of the win summed up the beauty of baseball. Unlike in 1960, no one player changed the game with a single swing of the bat. For both clubs, it was their team effort that brought them to the precipice of victory. The Cubs won as they had all year, with every player contributing to the victory. Their last two runs came on solid hitting and base running, not Babe Ruth-style heroics. Chicago also used five pitchers, not one dominant hurler.

Baseball entices us with its eternal spring, that joyous beginning to the season we experience each year. Just as joyous is the autumn, when the journey is completed, and the weary players can rest, knowing they have spent themselves to the fullest, reaching the height of their excellence. And as likely National League MVP Kris Bryant, playing in only his second season, wildly grinned as he threw a tough grounder to first baseman Anthony Rizzo for the final out, the Cubs finally came home.

Baseball is, at the end of the day, baseball. A game. A lark. A pastime. Except that nothing is "just" anything, and all of culture is closely tied to the people around us and the politics of our lives. As the saying goes: The personal is political. Even baseball. Even during the World Series.

Full disclosure: I'm a ride-or-die Cubs fan; there's nothing I'd like more than to see them sweep the Cleveland Indians this weekend, winning the World Series for the first time in over a century in Wrigley Field. (Fuller disclosure: If this happens, your reporter will lose her mind). So I get what Cleveland fans are going through — the excitement, the angst, the families gathered with literal tears in their eyes.

But we need to talk about "Chief Wahoo."

How troubling is the Indians' mascot? Let's imagine for a moment that the team was named after some other long-maligned, long-oppressed group. I don't know, let's say the Jews? Imagine the swarthy, hook-nosed face of Ol' Hymie on the players' caps. And hey, if fans want to use Jewish prayer shawls for rally towels, it's just good fun. Go Heebs!

Too far? The Cleveland Indians' Chief Wahoo is a garishly red (get it? 'Cause Indians are red?), be-feathered cartoon, all big nose and step-n-fetch-it grin. If you made him swarthy and swapped a yarmulke for his feather, Wahoo would be right at home in a Nazi pamphlet. He is, in a word, racist. The Chief doesn't ipso facto turn Cleveland fans into racists, but Native American activists have been calling for years on those fans to acknowledge and remove the blatant racism with which their fandom is saddled.

Cleveland is not, of course, the only offender. Down the street from my cuddly Cubs are the Chicago Blackhawks, and while the hockey franchise's Indian-in-profile mascot isn't buffoonish, he sure is a wrongly-appropriated Native American image. The country is littered with similarly named high school and college teams (Apaches, Scouts, Tomahawks); in 2002, a predominantly Native American college basketball team responded to a local high school's "Reds" by naming themselves the "Fightin' Whities" — a move that was (surprise!) controversial. And then of course there's the NFL's Washington "Redskins," a name so racist, even the dictionary calls it "contemptuous."

How did we get to this sorry state of affairs? Here's an excruciatingly brief recap: Comprising a complex civilization still not reflected in most history books, North America's inhabitants were invaded by strangers bearing both disease and notions of racial superiority — whole communities were decimated by rampant plagues even before organized slaughter began. The survivors were ultimately forced onto reservations, their children taken away to boarding schools, where their names were forcibly changed and their languages ripped from their throats — in order to "kill the Indian, save the man."

To add insult to literal injury, popular imagination now relegates the Native experience to a dead, largely invented, past: Noble Savages forever crossing the plains in a timeless, context-less journey — not real people, at least half of whom live today in urban settings.

Even as the world learned this week of more than 200total arrests in the ongoing oil pipeline protest, yet darker news was breaking: An In These Times investigative report found that "Natives [are] more likely to be killed by police than any other group, including African Americans" — a data point that joins other heartrending data points: suicide rates close to double that of any other group, labor force participation rates lower than anyone else, and 2.5 times the rates of sexual assault and rape, most of the sexual violence perpetrated by white people.

The appropriation of Indian imagery first took off in the early 20th century, just as the U.S. government was working overtime to extinguish Native cultures altogether. As Kevin Gover, director of the National Museum of the American Indian and a citizen of the Pawnee tribe, told USA Today: "It is an expression of the idea: 'We, the white people, won — and we can do anything with you and your imagery and your identity that we choose to do.'"

Some fans of teams with offensive iconography have vocally opposed any changes, confronting Native protesters or showing up on game day in red-face; others have taken a more respectful approach — as Chicago-based hockey columnist Jay Zawaski tweeted on Wednesday night: "I could not care less if the [Blackhawks] get rid of the logo. It's just a picture. My memories aren't tied to a cartoon," adding, "It is an offensive representation to many people."

Sports fans' opinions aside, as Native institutions and activists have made crystal clear, these mascots and team names are part of much broader, systemic dehumanization, the consequences of which continue to be literally deadly for Native Americans.

In response to growing anti-Wahoo protests, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is reportedly discussing "what should happen" with the mascot. I can only hope these discussions will include the actual people fighting for their cultural dignity, and prove the start of genuine efforts to dismantle a deeply shameful part of American culture.

But shedding mascots and names can only ever be that: A start. Native Americans continue to wait for a great deal more justice to be done.

For decades, professional football has reigned supreme on TV, pulling in greater viewership numbers "through recession and political unrest and war and shifting viewing habits and anything and everything else the United States has experienced since the Colts beat the Giants in the 1958 NFL title game," as Mike Florio recently put it at NBC Sports. That has given the NFL an aura of invincibility in an age of technological and market upheaval in media.

Until now.

Almost halfway through the 2016 NFL season, the signs are ominous. Total viewership for the first week declined 7 percent compared to 2015; the next two weeks declined 9 percent; and week four declined 12 percent. The Thursday night games broadcast by CBS are down by as much as 21 percent, as are ESPN's Monday Night Football broadcasts. All four of the major networks that carry the NFL — Fox, CBS, NBC, and ESPN — have seen drops of 4 percent, 10 percent, 7 percent, and 11 percent, respectively, according to an NFL memo.

No individual game was hit harder than the Monday Night Football game between the Atlanta Falcons and the New Orleans Saints, which had the bad luck to run opposite Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's first presidential debate on Sept. 26 — it fell a whopping 41 percent.

That gets us to the first explanation for the decline: This year's crazy-making presidential election campaign, which has brought in record audiences for the debates and dominated the nation's attention for months. That effect seems to be spilling over into the rest of television: Sunday afternoon audiences for MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN are up 36 percent this year. It's quite possible that many Americans are picking politics over football.

The arrival of the internet and its bonanza of free content, digital streaming, and a host of other opportunities presents something of an existential threat to the traditional broadcast business model. After all, there's a clear age component to this NFL ratings trend. For people 50 and over, viewership for traditional TV remains strong. But it's falling sharply for all other age groups, and among the under-35 crowd, it's absolutely collapsed: down by 30 percent just since 2010, and down by 40 percent for people under 25.

The NFL doesn't deny that changing technology is effecting its ratings. But so far it's painting the technology angle as just a part of the story — and it's painting the overall decline in viewership as a temporary setback, brought on by the freak confluence of the technology issue, the election, and some of the other factors listed.

And there's some reason to think they could be right: After the 2000 election, NFL viewership rebounded 15 percent, even as primetime viewership for other programs fell by a third. And during the first four weeks of this season, the number of football viewers was actually higher than during the equivalent period last season — 149.5 million versus 149.1 million. It's just that those 149.5 million are spending less time watching the games on an individual basis than the 149.1 million. If they're being temporarily distracted, those 149.5 million could eventually turn their gaze back to football for more extended periods.

Interestingly, though, TV viewership is down for the Premier League in Britain, too: by 20 percent since last year. And the anecdotal evidence collected by TheNew York Times points to the abundance of high quality internet streams that's undercutting the attractiveness of subscriptions to the official soccer broadcasts. That this is happening with soccer in England suggests this isn't just a quirk of American culture or election year viewership shifts, and that something more fundamental and structural is going on in the way we watch sports.

The NFL had better hope they're right that this is just temporary. Because the economics are stark: Most of the major networks have contracts with the NFL that run through 2022, and they've spent a grand total of $55 billion to get them. The networks in turn charge a high price for ad time during games. Those deals usually are based on the networks guaranteeing advertisers a certain level of viewership. When they get less viewership, the networks have to give the ad companies free air time to compensate — and viewership this year has come in 20 percent below the networks' estimates so far.

If the bleeding continues, networks may have to rethink their deals. The first canary in the coal mine will likely be the re-negotiation of Thursday Night Football for the 2018 season.

But keep an eye on the ratings once Election Day comes and goes. That will tell us a lot about whether the NFL's television reign is coming to an end.

In an election year that feels like a dark turning point in the history of the American nation, Major League Baseball is offering us a World Series that consoles us with the most wholesome pleasures conceivable. In sports terms, the Indians and the Cubs are ancient and venerable clans, with hard-bitten fans that are too used to losing year after year.

The Indians last won a World Series in 1948. The Cubs last won a World Series in 1908. Pick your favorite historical note. I've enjoyed relaying to people that the Indians last won a World Series before RCA introduced the 45 RPM record. And the Cubs last won a World Series before construction on the Titanic begun. (Four years before Downton Abbey's setting, if you prefer.) And yet we know that, barring a civilization-ending meteor strike, one of these teams is going to win the World Series this year.

To give you some idea of how seriously people are taking this, standing-room tickets in Wrigley Field are going for over $3,000 apiece. The Cubs present an extra bit of visual nostalgia — and it's not just the ivy. Unlike the roomy luxury seats of new stadiums, the crowd behind home plate in Wrigley is still crowded into each other tightly.

Despite their lovable losers reputation, the Cubs are coming in to the World Series as heavy favorites among bookies. The Cubs dominated the National League from the very start of the baseball season in April. They outgun the Indians in starting pitching. You may remember last year's National League Cy Young winner Jake Arrieta. Right behind him is Kyle Hendricks, who may win the Cy Young this year. And behind him is one of the best postseason pitchers of his generation, Jon Lester. Lester has pitched 21 innings this postseason and given up only two earned runs and two walks across them. He may pitch in three games out of seven if this Series goes the distance.

Dexter Fowler, who will become the first African American to appear in the World Series wearing a Cubs uniform when he comes to bat at Progressive Field for the first time, leads a lineup of batters that have recently shaken off a slump.

This is a team built to win this year and beyond. The turnaround has to be credited to Tom Ricketts, who purchased the team in 2009 and hired Theo Epstein as his president of baseball operations in 2011. If Epstein breaks the Cubs' curse just a little over a decade after doing the same for the Boston Red Sox, he becomes a Hall of Fame-worthy executive.

But don't plan for the parade yet.

The Indians are a team like few others. Like the Kansas City Royals in the last two years of the World Series, the Indians are a lineup without transcendent stars that somehow gets above-average contribution from the whole team. Well, maybe they have one transcendent star; shortstop Francisco Lindor has hit .323 for the Indians in the postseason while playing the kind of spectacular defense that has you texting friends or calling family members in from the kitchen to say, "You gotta see this." He is emblematic of a team that doesn't just win the game, but wins over new fans each time they play.

If the Indians have a shot it is because Terry Francona has pioneered masterly and innovative bullpen strategies to get through the playoffs. And he has the ultimate weapon to deploy in reliever Andrew Miller.

Miller is single-handedly inventing a new relief-pitcher role. In the past we had firemen who put out situations before they got out of hand. In the late 1980s, Tony LaRussa used Dennis Eckersley to pioneer the modern "closer" role, in which a great reliever was tasked with stealing the last three outs from a team that found itself behind in the final frame. In Miller we have a new "relief ace" who can be deployed at any time during the game. He may pitch two innings or more in a game, shutting down an opponent whose lineup is set to do damage in the middle innings. He is the breakout star of the 2016 postseason. During the regular season he put together a 1.45 ERA with a 0.68 WHIP.

This is the most fun matchup in the World Series in a long while and it could not come at a time when we needed it more. In the weeks before our quadrennial presidential election, the whole country fills with a kind of existential anxiety because we insist on treating that contest like it is a referendum on our own membership in our nation. My advice is to seek some relief in turning to a national pastime. In this one, America's nostalgists can find so much of the country's heritage to celebrate in the meeting of these venerable clubs and the new life that this Series brings to them. And our futurists can revel in a glimpse of America's future on the field, seeing in it something diverse and energetic.

If you've never been to a monster truck rally, imagine everything a boy is supposed to like, only bigger, louder, and much more dangerous. Souped-up trucks — on tractor-sized wheels and painted to look like sneering cartoon characters — crush cars, perform death-defying acts, and race through an obstacle course of mud. Even the trucks' names — Stone Crusher, Wrecking Crew, Monster Mutt, Ground Pounder — beg to be said in a low-register growl. And yes, the majority of monster truck drivers are male, as are the fans, but there is a small, and growing, cohort of women breaking into the monster truck boys' club.

Becky McDonough launches her monster truck, El Toro Loco, into the air during the freestyle competition at the Advance Auto Parts Monster Jam in Providence, Rhode Island. | (Peter Pereira)

Becky McDonough is one such driver. The 29-year-old Californian drives the El Toro Loco — a bright yellow truck with horns, a churlish grin, and a swath of red flames painted across each side. McDonough worked her way up the monster truck hierarchy, from team mechanic to crew chief to, finally, driver in 2011. "I turned wrenches for four years," she said in a video interview for Monster Jam, a monster truck event touring company. "People always come up and think I'm one of the guys' wives... It's really not a traditional thing for women to be in this sport… so I had to work that much harder to prove myself as a female in this sport, and all that hard work finally paid off and I'm now behind the wheel."

Becky takes a breather between the freestyle and timed events. | (Peter Pereira)

In March 2013, photographer Peter Pereira went backstage at the Monster Truck Jam in Providence, Rhode Island, where he photographed McDonough and her all-female team. "I like to focus on stories that break misconceptions," he said in an interview.

Pereira spent the day with McDonough and her crew as they prepared for the rally. "I got the sense that they felt that they had to work just a little harder to impress their competition," he said. He also captured the main event and watched McDonough win the freestyle portion. Below, step into the Monster Truck Jam arena with the El Toro Loco team and see how it's done.

On the football field, lining up John Urschel across from Tanguy Ringoir would be unfair and possibly lethal.

Urschel, a Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman, is 6-foot-3 and weighs more than 300 pounds. Ringoir, a grandmaster chess player known as the "Belgian Butcher," is a flight risk in a sharp wind.

Across the chessboard, they are better-matched opponents.

Urschel is pursuing a Ph.D. in math at MIT during the off-season and last year published a paper titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector." Ringoir is studying economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and captains its powerhouse chess team, which has won six national collegiate championships.

Squaring off recently, the 25-year-old lineman surveyed the board, then pushed one of his pieces into a problem.

"Finally," the Butcher said, making a move that knocked Urschel back to his goal line. "I kept thinking, 'When will he make a mistake?'"

Urschel resigned, offering his enormous right hand across the board. There is no equally civilized move in football. And for that, Urschel is thankful. The noncontact world of chess is where he exercises his brain, and his vicious competitiveness, when he's not blocking blitzes or solving problems in applied mathematics.

"You can get the adrenaline going playing chess," Urschel told the Butcher and other UMBC chess players. "But there's a difference. There's nothing like the adrenaline on the football field where a guy is trying to beat the f--- out of me and I'm trying to beat the f--- out of him."

That difference — taking on beasts, not pawns — worries his family, math mentors, and chess buddies as the reported number of ex-National Football League players suffering from brain damage increases.

More than 40 percent of retired players showed signs of traumatic brain injury, a study released earlier this year found. Some have even killed themselves. What, Urschel's relatives and friends sometimes wonder, will be left of his brain when he retires to pursue a scholarly career in math? Is his four-year, $2.3 million contract worth the possible long-term costs?

"I think it is a valid concern, and I have talked to him about it," said Ludmil Zikatanov, a math professor at Penn State University, where Urschel earned his bachelor's and master's degrees. "It is obvious he is very talented in math and will one day be teaching at a top university."

His mother, Venita Parker, also worries. Going back to his college days, she has asked him the same question after every season:

"Are you done yet?"

And Urschel will answer, "No, I still have some more football left in me."

People who encountered Urschel as a child generally came away with two impressions. One, he was a very smart boy. Two, he was a very large boy. His parents — his father a surgeon, his mother an attorney — divorced when he was 3.

Raising him as a single mom in Buffalo, Parker bought him math games at Toys "R" Us, but he quickly conquered them. She bought games for higher age groups, but he mastered those, too. Her son's brain became increasingly costly. Parker challenged him at stores to quickly calculate the amount of change she was supposed to receive. If he was correct, he could keep the amount.

"After a few weeks, we had to stop that," Parker said. "It was just too expensive."

One day, she taught him how to play chess. That didn't turn out well for her either.

"He quickly became better than me," she said.

Urschel was an equally astute athlete, though his size was problematic for youth football. He couldn't play Pop Warner because he weighed too much. He couldn't play for his middle school because the circumference of his head exceeded the capacity of the team's helmets.

Urschel played lacrosse and soccer instead, waiting until his freshman year of high school to play football. Why did he yearn for football? Urschel admired his dad's success in college football at the University of Alberta, where he played linebacker but became a surgeon instead of pursuing a pro career. Also, Urschel enjoys physical contact.

"I love hitting people out there," he said.

Urschel turned down scholarship offers to play at Stanford, Princeton, and Cornell, choosing Penn State for its combination of big-time football program and solid academics. "I never wanted to have to make a choice between football and academics," he said. "They were both important to me."

So Urschel studied math. And he played for Joe Paterno.

He made straight A's. And he was drafted by the Ravens in the fifth round.

"I have never had a student like him," said Zikatanov, Urschel's Penn State math mentor.

And though Ivy Leaguers and gifted minds are found throughout professional sports, there are few professional athletes like him in history — with the gravitas and pure genius that go beyond the extraordinary.

There was Bill Bradley, a Rhodes scholar who played basketball for Princeton and then the New York Knicks before becoming a U.S. senator. Moe Berg, a baseball player in the 1920s and '30s who graduated from Princeton University and Columbia Law School, spoke multiple languages and became a spy during World War II. And Byron White, who led the NFL in rushing in the 1930s and later became a Supreme Court justice.

But none of them, even White, endured the relentless and violent hits to the head that today's NFL players live through. Urschel says he has calculated the risk.

"I understand this could be a thing, and I recognize it completely," he said, "but I accept the risk."

So far, he's suffered just one concussion. He said his dad, now 58, is doing well after playing college football at an intense position.

Urschel doesn't worry what his life might be like when he's 60 or 70. And he says he's not playing for the money. He lives frugally, driving a 2013 Nissan hatchback.

"I think for a lot of things in life, it's less about the length of time and more about cherishing the time you have," he said. "And let me tell you, I'm living an amazing quality of life. I get to play football. I get to play math. I get to play chess."

Urschel began taking chess seriously during his junior year at Penn State, when the football team manager was looking for an opponent. Urschel saw connections between chess and football — thinking ahead about the other guy's next move, blocking out distractions, having a plan B.

It wasn't long before Urschel was watching both SportsCenter and Chess​Center, an online chess news show that airs on Chess.com. And now, three seasons into his NFL career, the notoriety of being a professional football player/math Ph.D. student/chess player has turned him into a peculiar celebrity.

Urschel is the "advanced stats columnist" for the Players Tribune, an online publication started by former New York Yankees star Derek Jeter that publishes first-person essays by sports stars. He posts a math quiz every Wednesday. The questions recently included "What is the smallest positive integer not definable in fewer than 12 words? (No hyphens!)"

Good luck figuring the answer out before Urschel provides it a week later. The explanations sometimes run several paragraphs.

Ravens fans are proud of their genius lineman. One fan even mailed him a physics textbook. Urschel, who reads math books to relax, wishes more fans would send books. (If you have an advanced text you no longer need, Urschel asks that you mail it to the Ravens' training facility at 1 Winning Drive, Owings Mills, Md., 21117. He promises to read everything.)

In chess, Urschel has been invited to play against some of the country's best players, including a charity event this spring against Fabiano Caruana, the third-highest-rated player in history. Urschel resigned less than four minutes into the game.

But he got to hang out with Caruana and Robert Hess, a prodigy who earned his grandmaster title at 17 while playing football at Stuyvesant High School in New York City.

"He was actually more excited to meet me than I was to meet him," Hess said. "It's just unbelievable how much he loves chess."

Hess lives in New York and runs TheSports​Quotient.com, a news site for sports geeks. Urschel regularly visits him to talk chess. Hess prefers football gossip. This summer, walking home from brunch, a street hustler pegged Urschel as a good mark for a chess game.

Urschel was game. He took black. The hustler took white.

"Big man coming to play," the hustler said, as Urschel made a move. The hustler's other commentary consisted of "Mmmm" and "That's a good move, fella."

The lineman won.

It did not go that well at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where the match between Urschel and the Belgian Butcher was arranged by The Washington Post. It was not exactly a fair fight. Urschel has a provisional rating of around 1600 — good, but not grandmaster great. Ringoir's rating is a much-better 2496.

Even so, Urschel took it about as seriously as a Sunday NFL game. A few hours before the match, Urschel FaceTimed with Hess, going over potential openings.

The lineman lost the first game but commanded the Butcher's respect.

"There were some moves I was impressed by," Ringoir said.

They decided to play again.

"Round two," Urschel declared. "Redemption."

It was silent for a while. They went back and forth. The Butcher cracked a smile.

"What?" the lineman said.

"I'm getting the bishop, so I'm very happy," the Butcher said.

The lineman resigned.

"Can you show me where I went astray?" he asked.

They put the pieces back on the board, setting up an instant replay in slow motion.

Originally published in The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission.

I do mean everyone. So please don't tell me you don't watch sports, or don't read about them, or think that baseball (or football, or golf, or ping-pong) is boring. Because sports stories are never really about sports. They're about people: what makes us want to succeed, and what we do when we fail. Sports stories are about rivalries and friendships and curses and miracles. There is nothing more human, or more fascinating, than that.

When Leicester City beat Manchester United (that's English soccer, sports haters) earlier this year, claiming its first title in its 132-year history and overcoming 5,000-to-1 odds, it was never about the sport itself. It was a story about an underdog. It was a victory in the footsteps of David and Goliath, the Russians' defeat of Napoleon, Harry Potter vanquishing Voldemort.

But often, sports aren't this binary. Life is rarely this black and white. Sometimes you don't have David or Harry Potter.

Sometimes you have the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Dodgers are the Jay Gatsby of baseball, the Charles Foster Kane of the MLB. All the money in the world can't seem to afford them what they really want: happiness.

Oh, don't pity the poor Dodgers. There are plenty of teams in the 2016 MLB playoffs with World Series droughts longer than the Dodgers, who have gone a relatively short 28 years without a title. The Chicago Cubs, for example, are fighting a goat curse that has allegedly kept them from winning for 107 years. The Cleveland Indians haven't won the World Series since Harry Truman was president.

But it's not the drought that makes the Dodgers interesting. It's the quest.

The Dodgers are filthy rich, thanks to a 2013 Time Warner Cable TV deal worth $8.35 billion. As a result, they've been able to pay up for immense (and expensive) talent like the lights-out pitcher Clayton Kershaw, the knight in shining armor in this narrative if there ever was one, and have tangled themselves up in deals where they continue to pay big bucks to Carl Crawford, Matt Kemp, and Michael Morse, who are no longer even on the team. The Dodgers once signed Héctor Olivera to a $62.5 million deal, and he never even had an at-bat in Dodger Stadium.

But despite the lavishing of huge money and the inflation of equally huge expectations, the Dodgers have failed to actually, you know, win. And really, every great sports story ultimately comes down to its ending.

That is just how sports work. There are only two possible endings: winning and losing. There is no other way out (the tragicomic 2002 All-Star Game notwithstanding).

Consider Molly Knight's brilliant Dodgers book, The Best Team Money Can Buy, from that perspective. Knight tells the story of the Dodgers 2012-2015 seasons. There is no satisfying conclusion. The Dodgers went 86-76, 92-70, 94-68, and 92-70 in those four seasons. Not bad! But they never even made the World Series, let alone won it. Not great.

And so, The Best Team Money Can Buy is ultimately about the Dodgers losing, but not losing so tremendously that it becomes a sort of morality play about the perils of trying to buy happiness. The Dodgers hoped to be great, and were instead pretty good. This is rarely the stuff of great sports stories.

But here's the thing: Knight's book actually is great — because it refuses to try to make the Dodgers mythical. It embraces the messiness and disappointment of real life. People don't always win. They don't always break the curse. Sometimes "even year magic" is just a coincidence, and "devil magic" is just really good baseball. Life is chaotic and beautiful and weird, but really, it's mostly chaotic. The fact that any of us exist at all is hilarious and impossible.

So instead of artificially creating a narrative for the sake of trying to organize the game into a beginning-middle-climax-and-conclusion, Knight takes a brave and almost baffling step to close the book with the beginning of the 2015 season. She hands the outcome of the story entirely to the reader to find out on her own: You want to know what happens to the Dodgers? Go watch them yourself.

It makes a lot of sense. Art may imitate life, and baseball is nothing if not an art.

So will the Dodgers finally get their happily ever after this year? Who knows. The Nationals, who the Dodgers will meet tonight in the National League Division Series, are a formidable foe. "In this battle of snake-bitten behemoths, I like the more youthful Nats to win their first postseason series since the franchise moved from Montreal," Anthony L. Fisher writes in his playoff predictions for The Week.

But really, who knows. And that's what's so great. I love baseball for its unpredictability. For every 99 percent chance there is always a 1 percent chance, too. For every 86-year-old curse, there is eventually a 2004 Boston Red Sox.

This is what excites me the most: In terms of the Dodgers' "story," I'm not sure this game or this series will even really matter. Tonight could just be one more delightfully messy chapter. Maybe there isn't an ending after all. Maybe that's the real lesson of the Dodgers' story.

Here it comes, the season after the season. The month that cannot be scripted. The crucible where 33 percent of baseball's franchises compete to determine the champion of the world. The crapshoot of a four-tiered playoff tournament where mediocre teams sometimes rise over juggernauts.

Yes, it's the Major League Baseball postseason. And it starts tonight with the first of two single elimination "wild card" play-in games. I'll admit I was dubious when this fourth round of the playoffs was added in 2012, but it has finally added some value to being a division winner. With MLB's 162-game season and many, many variables, baseball is singular among America's four major team sports in that the worst team in the league can beat the best on any given day, which makes a do-or-die playoff game especially nerve-wracking, and thus, great entertainment.

Each of the early round matchups are filled with fun storylines, be they redemption stories, rivalries renewed, or the possibility of purging generations worth of futility. As the 2016 vintage of October baseball kicks off, here's what you need to know about each of the 10 contenders.

In the junior circuit, the Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays — two teams who have long toiled in the shadows of the other three teams in the AL East, but have emerged as reliably punchy upstarts over the past few seasons — square off in the American League wild card game.

The Orioles have one of the best young players in the game in third baseman Manny Machado, but rely heavily on a feast-or-famine offense that's heavy on both home runs and strikeouts, and a pitching rotation that doesn't exactly impose fear in the hearts of hitters. If you're the superstitious type, you might also worry about the O's Buck Showalter problem. Their skipper might be a three-time Manager of the Year winner with a reputation for turning losers into winners in short order, but he's never made it to a World Series, and two of his previous three teams went on to win the World Series the season after he left. But baseball's not superstitious, right?

The Blue Jays, on the other hand, found their mojo last season after more than 20 years in the wilderness. They can hit, they can field, and their pitching is formidable. They pick fights and flip bats and don't care if you don't like them. They've made baseball a thing again in Canada, drawing almost 3.5 million fans to the Rogers Centre this season. And after losing to last year's eventual champs, the Kansas City Royals, in the American League Championship Series (ALCS), they've got a chip on their shoulder. I like Toronto's bats to best Baltimore's starter Chris Tillman and win a berth to face the Texas Rangers in a rematch of last season's thrilling five-game ALDS.

The Rangers are owners of the best record in the AL for the first time in their history, though they still carry the demons of having lost two World Series earlier this decade (in 2011 they were one strike away TWICE before blowing a lead to the St. Louis Cardinals). This is a balanced, sneaky-excellent squad, led by perennially underrated future Hall of Famer Adrian Beltre and a rock-solid bullpen. A reason to worry? They've got an exceptional record in one-run games: 36-11. While that obviously speaks well of their nerves and ability to close the deal, one has to wonder if they can sustain that in October. My pick? The Jays once again take out Texas in a nail-biter.

The most intriguing matchup in the American League Divisional Series has to be the Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians. Once the poster children for tragic futility and disharmony, the Red Sox are nothing but good feelings and monstrously prolific offense (they have an MLB-leading plus-184 run differential, topping Cleveland, the AL's second best, by 83 runs). The franchise and its fans no longer fear collapse. You could say they've become everything they once hated, smug and confident in their dominance. Their starting pitching is underrated, led by Rick Porcello's Cy Young-caliber season, which has more than made up for David Price's free agent flop. And you may have heard of some guy who's retiring while putting up some unprecedented numbers for a 40-year-old designated hitter.

Then you've got the Tribe — led by Boston's former Curse-breaking field general Terry Francona — the winners of their first AL Central division title since 2007. Cleveland celebrated its first pro championship since 1964 earlier this year, courtesy of LeBron James and the Cavaliers, and while King James won't be with the Indians on the diamond, the team has freely admitted to being buoyed by the spirit of victory around the city, and other than a certain team on the north side of Chicago, no franchise has gone longer without a title. To tame the Sox's bats, the Indians will have to rely on 2014 AL Cy Young winner Corey Kluber, plus a lights out bullpen anchored by Andrew Miller and Cody Allen. Ultimately, I pick the Red Sox over the Indians in four.

In the National League, the New York Mets — last year's World Series runners-up — face the winners of three World Series this decade (all even numbered years), the San Francisco Giants. Like in 2015, there was plenty of good reason to give up on the Amazin's mid-season, but then they put together a September run that was good enough to host the wild card game. Conversely, the Giants endured a second half swoon that took them from the best record in the majors at the All-Star Break to just barely earning a bid to the play-in game, which they clinched on the last day of the regular season with a win over the Los Angeles Dodgers, who having clinched the third seed in the NL, had nothing to play for. I like the Mets to win at home, but they're facing arguably the best postseason pitcher of all time in Madison Bumgarner, who doesn't want you to look at him.

The winner of Mets-Giants will play the Chicago Cubs, who with 103 wins had MLB's best regular season record by eight games. You may have heard they're cursed by a billy goat or a hapless fan who reached for a foul ball. But that's silly. The fact is their 108-year-title drought has more to do with poor management and often unmotivated ownership that knows most of the appeal of Wrigley Field is cutting out of work early to drink in the daytime…with winning an afterthought. But with the hiring of Red Sox-Curse-slayer Theo Epstein to run the front office, the culture in Wrigleyville has changed. They drafted smartly, they did very well in free agency (Jason Heyward aside), they hired Joe Maddon — the guy who (with no budget) took the Tampa Bay Rays to the playoffs regularly — and they gave him a huge budget! Win or lose, the Cubs will be a force in the NL Central for years, but now that they're top dogs of the regular season, there can be no moral victories: It's World Series or bust on the North Side. And indeed, I predict the Cubs will have their revenge on the Mets, who swept them in the NLCS last season.

Finally, the Washington Nationals andLos Angeles Dodgers — two of the most expensive and disappointing franchises in recent years, always loaded with talent but frequently departing from the postseason early — face off in the other NLDS. Both teams fired their managers amid major discord after last season, and both bounced back to win their divisions this year. The Nats have wunderkind superstar Bryce Harper — a force even in an off year for him — and perennial Cy Young candidate Max Scherzer, plus career seasons from catcher Wilson Ramos and last year's Mets postseason monster Daniel Murphy.

The Dodgers, once again, are led by ace southpaw Clayton Kershaw, who despite putting up Sandy Koufax-like numbers in the regular season has yet to prove he can hack it in October. Japanese import and Rookie of the Year candidate Kenta Maeda is also no slouch on the mound, but no one on the Dodgers topped 90 runs batted in (RBI) this season. However, they might be one of those teams that "got hot at the right time," making their 91-win season look less impressive than it is because of how many injuries the veteran-heavy team has had to manage this year. In this battle of snake-bitten behemoths, I like the more youthful Nats to win their first postseason series since the franchise moved from Montreal.

Who's gonna win it all? It's a crapshoot given the freaky nature of one-off elimination games and short series where a streaky hitter or a pitcher in the zone can make all predictions moot. But since calling your shot is half the fun, I'd say the Red Sox have all the tools needed to storm through the playoffs. But I also like the sentimental as well as mathematical favorites — the Cubs — to unleash the young offense that was flummoxed by the Mets' power-pitching in last year's NLCS.

The champs? Sorry Cubs fans, you won't be able to fetishize your misery any more come November. For the rest of us, look forward to many, many nauseating months of Chicago celebs, pundits, and artists waxing poetic about always believing. A virtual cottage industry will spring up around the Cubbies' first championship since before World War I. But like the Red Sox, that special sheen that comes with being "cursed" will fade, making them just another winner with a big payroll.

The retirement tour of Boston Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz is nearing its emotional conclusion, and the universal praise for the accomplishments of perhaps the most beloved ballplayer ever to call Fenway Park home has been lavished on Big Papi from opposing teams, fans, and a press corps that has long elevated the slugger to folk hero status.

You can't argue with Ortiz's legacy in Boston. He was a monster producer in all three of their World Series championships since breaking an 86-year "curse" in 2004, including a number of iconic game-winning hits, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of toothy smiles. He also had that "This is our f--king city" moment following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and followed it up with a season where the Red Sox were an unlikely behemoth — a team coming off two disastrous seasons with no expectations to win — only to become World Series champions backed by a historic offensive performance by Ortiz in the Fall Classic.

Ortiz's universal adoration in Boston will withstand the test of time. Expect every dive bar in New England to name a chowder recipe in his honor. Ortiz is more than a player. He is Big Papi.

But here's the thing: Big Papi is a myth.

It's a myth that has endured a career's worth of evidence to the contrary. It's a myth enabled by wide-eyed sportswriters who insist that "the myth of Papi has no dark edges" and that this 40-year-old "Father Christmas" figure — at an age where the skills of all of his baseball contemporaries have long since succumbed to the ravages of time — is having a completely unimpeachable career season at the plate.

The man behind the myth is less appealing. David Ortiz is a thin-skinned, self-promoting narcissist, prone to violent tantrums and playing fast and loose with the truth, possessing a persecution complex that would make Richard Nixon blush.

Big Papi has rightfully been credited with bringing the bat-flip from the no-no side of the "unwritten rules list" to a Muhammad Ali-like understanding that "it's not bragging if you can back it up." This is good. But Ortiz's bat-flips aren't impromptu celebrations, they're thoroughly choreographed affairs, punctuated by record-setting slow home run trots, and a ceremonial pointing to the heavens. This isn't in-the-moment happiness, it's phony marketing.

After a particularly showy bat-flip from Ortiz perturbed New York Yankees' manager Joe Girardi in 2011, Ortiz told reporters "that's Papi's style" and advised the opposing skipper to "take it like a man." But when the widely respected Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia plunked Ortiz on the hip the next night — the first time in 161 games against the Red Sox's archrivals where he had been hit by a pitch — Ortiz lashed out at beat reporters, calling them "unprofessional" and blaming them for the brushback he received for showing up an opponent.

Lest you think Ortiz has taken a beating from opposing pitchers, note that he ranks 779th among players on the career all-time hit by pitch list, with a grand total of 37. For all the talk of "unwritten rules," it appears that Ortiz's opponents pretty much let him write his own (the guy barely bothers to leave the batter's box unless he's certain he's got a hit), while still aggressively policing other sluggers who excessively admire their home runs. That's fortunate, because lovable Big Papi possesses both a fragile ego and a short fuse.

Ortiz's many violent eruptions — which include but are hardly limited to throwing several bats at a group of umpires, endangering the eyesight of his teammates as he eviscerated a dugout phone, and his standard freakouts over pitches that are correctly called strikes — are written off as the "passion" of an intense competitor. But in truth, Ortiz is as prodigious with his mortifyingly aggressive tantrums as he is with his clutch hitting.

Exhibiting conduct that would brand less pathologically-excused players as egomaniacal heels, Ortiz has repeatedly demonstrated a fixation on his own statistics. His tendency to complain about the official scorers whenever he feels a questionably batted ball should have been ruled a hit is well documented. But he is a man who likes the spotlight, and in 2011, Ortiz made a spectacle of himself by blasting into his beleaguered manager's postgame press conference to let his field general know how "pissed" he was over being denied what he felt was his rightful RBI during that day's game. It should be noted that this was while Ortiz was playing on a team that was weeks away from a historic September collapse, characterized by a "toxic" and disharmonious clubhouse filled with selfish players. Perhaps this was leadership?

Ortiz takes his legacy very seriously. He's not shy about declaring himself a Hall of Famer, despite playing 87 percent of his games as a designated hitter — a position at which no one who has played more than 57 percent of his games has been enshrined in Cooperstown. The argument that he's maybe the best DH of all time, combined with his Curse of the Bambino-destroying postseason numbers, are frequently deployed by Papi-ists as reasons why he — once again — should be considered by a different set of rules.

Which leads us to the elephant in the room: David Ortiz's name was on a list of 104 players who failed a PED test in 2003, the same year he went from a marginal player approaching age 30 to launching the legend of Big Papi.

The test in question was meant to be an anonymous survey test. Players knew the test was coming, and if more than 5 percent of them failed, mandatory in-season PED testing would begin the following year. That threshold was easily met, and the "post-PED" era technically began in 2004, even though we now know recidivist cheaters regularly beat the league's testing apparatus, and likely will always be a step ahead of testing technologies.

But unlike Alex Rodriguez — whose name appeared on the same list as Ortiz and immediately became mud, his career's worth of accomplishments forever perceived as "tainted" — Ortiz was able to spin the narrative to his favor, a narrative that remains the prevailing assessment of the baseball-consuming public to this day.

When Ortiz's name was one of seven leaked at different times throughout 2009, the media pitchforks stayed patiently at bay while he stonewalled them for more than a week, saying he was "blindsided" to learn he had failed a drug test but promised to "get to the bottom of this" and tell the whole story when the time was right. When that time finally arrived, Ortiz sat next to the late Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) president Michael Weiner and let the union leader do most of the talking. Weiner — in carefully orchestrated legalese and armed with a fallback excuse that the list contained eight players who tested positive for substances not yet banned by MLB — was at least more candid than the mealy-mouthed Ortiz.

Far from getting to the bottom of anything, Big Papi sheepishly offered an apology for being "a distraction," denied ever knowingly buying or taking steroids, and claimed to not know what he tested positive for. Like a manipulative child pleading with a sympathetic adult, Ortiz told reporters, "I never thought buying supplements and vitamins was going to hurt anybody's feelings… If it happened I'm sorry about that."

For Ortiz defenders, those have always been his "outs": Either he didn't know what he was taking was a PED, or he was one of the eight sorta, kinda innocent players out of 104 who ended up on a list of positive PED tests, and nobody knows for what substance.

Ortiz weathered the storm largely thanks to a pliant sports media accepting his muddled explanations. The story pretty much went away, and when Ken Burns put together a montage of "suspected" steroid users in the 2010 "Tenth Inning" special addition to his Baseball documentary series, Ortiz's visage was conspicuously absent. His sagging output at the plate and apparently broken-down body elicited a weepy eulogy for his career from leading Red Sox propagandist Bill Simmons.

But then, Big Papi was back! During the supposedly post-steroid era where guys got old when they were supposed to — the epic seasons put together by Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens in their late 30s during the previous decade now widely perceived as steroid-tainted mirages — Ortiz started putting up numbers unseen by a player his age since, ahem, Barry Bonds. Those few to publicly raise an eyebrow over such a unusual turn of events were deemed big, nasty meanies, or even (gasp!) "haters" for not wholeheartedly embracing the Book of Saint Papi.

The mantras defending Ortiz were built around "the test was supposed to be anonymous!" — a defense never afforded A-Rod, Manny Ramirez, or Sammy Sosa — and "he denied taking them!" — which never worked for any other player linked as directly to steroids. Some flailing Papi-istas will point out that he's physically leaner in recent years, as though skinny Dee Gordon's failed drug test never happened.

But no justification of Ortiz's late-career output has been as prodigiously deployed as "He's never tested positive since 2003!" That's true. So is this: Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens — respectively the best hitter and pitcher of their generation — never failed a PED test, yet are all but barred from the Hall of Fame thanks to (very reasonably held) steroid suspicions. Another slugger with Hall of Fame numbers, Jeff Bagwell, also looks likely to never be elected to the Hall because of steroid suspicions, even though he has never failed a drug test, nor does he have any known connections to banned steroid dealers.

Ortiz, who ESPN's Tony Kornheiser declared a "first ballot" Hall of Famer, does have those connections. His (and Alex Rodriguez's) long-time trainer Angel Presinal has been banned from baseball since 2001 after being caught traveling with a bag of steroids in the company of former MVP Juan Gonzalez, but that didn't stop Ortiz from training with him in the Dominican Republic for years afterward.

Even though the story of Ortiz's positive test had long been flushed down the memory hole, Ortiz couldn't help angrily bringing it up several times in recent years. In 2013 he called himself a "warrior" for being able to survive his single non-confrontational press conference over the PED test, adding, "somebody was trying to hurt me." And who might that have been, David? He offered no specifics, but told the Boston Globe that the conspiracy against him was "something based in New York," and hinted that it might have come directly from the Red Sox's archrival New York Yankees.

He later wrote an op-ed for The Players' Tribune exclusively devoted to his aggrievement over being perceived in the minds of some as a cheater. He claimed "nobody in MLB history has been tested for PEDs more than me," estimating that he had been subject to more than 80 tests. NBC Sports' Craig Calcaterra noted at the time that either Ortiz was wildly inflating the number of drug tests he had been given, or had accidentally revealed that he had failed a drug test we didn't know about, making him subject to additional testing per MLB's Joint Drug Agreement.

Is it possible that Ortiz is the unluckiest slugger in history, and has been clean as a whistle the whole time? Could it be true that in the very season he tested (falsely?) positive for PEDs, he transformed from an unemployed mediocre 28-year-old DH to the most feared slugger of the next decade, and later from a seemingly washed-up walking injury to an ageless superhero (in the kinda, sorta post-steroid era) having a historically prolific campaign in his final season?

Anything is possible, I suppose.

Ortiz's legacy as a baseball deity in Boston is deserved, and secure. But there's more to his legacy: PED suspicions, non-stop self-aggrandizement, and relentless whining about contracts, official scorers, and the rare beanball.

Credulous fans and obsequious sportswriters will continue to lap up every last pre-game ceremony of Ortiz's farewell tour (the one he swore he'd never take). But while they continue their relentless peddling of the myth of Big Papi, the rest of us should feel confident in this truth: David Ortiz is a jerk.

Some people stand up for what they believe. Some people sit down. Occasionally, they pour beer on each other.

Welcome to the curious mix of sports, politics, patriotism, and claims of oppression in the United States of America.

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has drawn the ire of the nation for doing something Kaepernick's been doing a lot over the last couple of years: sitting out. When the national anthem played at a 49ers preseason game last Friday, Kaepernick stayed on the bench rather than stand as players and fans alike have done for far longer than Kaepernick has been alive. This immediately put me in mind of an incident that has achieved legendary status among my family and friends. In the spring of 1982, more than five years before Kaepernick's birth, my then-girlfriend and I invited our fathers to an Angels game so they could become acquainted. Before the game started, the young man in front of Dave, my girlfriend's father, refused to stand for the national anthem. A Navy veteran, Dave poured his beer over the young man's head and told him to have more respect. The police at the stadium thought it was pretty funny, and settled for separating our two groups for the rest of the night.

Now, that's not an acceptable form of counter-protest, from a legal or a moral standpoint. Legally, that would be battery — beer battery, I suppose, but still a misdemeanor. And yet, when we told that story more out of a sense of chagrin, everyone who heard it had the same reaction, regardless of political orientation: I'd like to pay him for the beer.

Kaepernick says he deliberately remained seated as a form of protest. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," the quarterback told NFL Media's Sam Wyche. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

It's clear that Kaepernick feels deeply about these issues. Just exactly how Kaepernick's decision to sit out the national anthem changes that alleged status quo is somewhat less clear. Antagonizing the NFL fan base will change little. It also seems like a poor substitute for actual action — say, working with communities suffering this alleged oppression or finding out exactly what challenges law-enforcement agencies face.

It's not even a terribly original form of protest. NBC noted that professional athletes have done this before, such as 20 years ago when the NBA's Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf began refusing to stand for the anthem for religious reasons. In 2004, Toronto Blue Jays star Carlos Delgado stopped participating in the singing of "God Bless America" because of his opposition to the Iraq War.

Some are hailing Kaepernick as a hero standing up to the establishment — and are lashing out at those who criticize him. "You have to applaud a guy for that," former NFL star Brian Mitchell told comedian Dean Obeidallah on his eponymous Sirius XM radio show. "He knew there would be a lot of backlash coming from that," Mitchell continued. "The people willing to dump on Kaepernick for making his expression public," USA Today columnist Jarrett Bell wrote, "are conveniently denying him the respect that he deserves to do just that." "When you criticize someone for criticizing America (Love it or leave it, Kaepernick!)," former MSNBC host Touré tweeted on Saturday, "you're proving that you don't understand America," adding a #1stA hashtag to reference the First Amendment.

Kaepernick can protest in any legal form he desires as part of his First Amendment birthright, for any cause he so desires. But so can his critics, and all of the people he offended by his silly and insubstantial action. Guess what? That's also free speech. Why should that also not get respect? It's every bit an exercise of the First Amendment as Kaepernick's words and actions. Free speech does not mean that complainers get a free pass from incurring criticism for their words and actions, nor does it indemnify protesters from the free-market consequences of alienating those who patronize their businesses.

Dave, who passed away several years ago but who still has a place in my heart, was one of those fans. Dave had worked hard to make a living and take care of his family most of his life. He didn't have the gift of athletic talent to transform himself into a wealthy man, but he enjoyed the efforts of those who did. Sports was something we could share and enjoy together apart from all of the other debates in life.

Dave and I may not have seen entirely eye to eye on politics, but we both knew that love of country goes beyond that. He understood that America wasn't perfect, but at least America tried. When Dave spent his limited cash and spare time on a ballgame, he didn't do it to attend a protest; all he wanted was a moment of respect for the imperfect country he loved.

Contrast that with Kaepernick. Was sitting down an act of bravery on par with putting on a uniform to defend the nation or struggle to scratch out a living for his family, or was it just a cheap stunt to get attention for himself? What did Kaepernick risk, other than criticism? His wealth provides him the means for a large measure of security. The people who walk actual protest lines risk far more than Kaepernick ever did, and the people who act to reach out to improve relations between government and its citizens risk even more. If the worst that happens to Kaepernick is that people criticize him for his political stunts, he's still miles ahead of most of those who made him rich.

There are a lot more Daves than Colins in the NFL's audience. They have voices too, and deserve to be heard, perhaps more than a pampered NFL quarterback. Which of these should we respect more? On this, I'll stick with the Daves … as long as they hold onto the beer.

Someone has to say it. The commissioner of Major League Baseball might not understand the game of baseball.

Rob Manfred has had baseball's top job since January of 2015. Whereas his predecessor was mostly a caretaker, dutifully serving the interests of team owners in labor disputes, and mostly leaving the on-field product alone, Manfred constantly throws out radical ideas. Even if they are contradictory.

Manfred's diagnosis is that baseball's fans are too old and white for the future health of the sport. Of course, other leagues would love some of these die-hard fans because they happen to have a lot of money and like spending it on entertainment. But Manfred is correct that this does constitute a long-term problem for baseball. When Boomers begin dying out in earnest, baseball will be left with a much diminished fanbase. Manfred's belief is that baseball games need to be shorter and feature more scoring and action to regain cache among the young and hip.

Here is how he described how baseball is changing:

The fact is that the game has changed and is continuing to change — in my view, at an accelerating rate. Games have become longer. In 1975, the average game was 2 hours and 30 minutes. Now the average game is three hours. In 1988, 272 pitches were thrown in an average game. Today, the strategy of working counts and taking pitches means that it takes an additional 22 pitches to complete that same game. Back in 1988, the average major league club used 17 pitchers over the course of the season. In 2015, the average club used 27 pitchers. We are seeing less of our star starting pitchers, more delays for pitching changes, and less action at exciting points late in the game.

Today, major league players are hitting home runs at a record pace, but the number of balls put in play is at a historic low. There have been more strikeouts this season than in any other season in baseball history since 1871. Offensive strategies like situational hitting and stealing bases, which often create exciting moments for fans, are less prevalent today than at any point since the Year of the Pitcher in 1968. These changes have occurred not due to new rules but almost exclusively because of decisions made by creative general managers and managers in an effort to win as many games as possible. [ESPN]

Not all of these changes are obviously undesirable. Some of the increase in the number of pitchers used is due to the fact that teams take better care of their players' health. They put pitchers on the disabled list more easily now, they nurse them through surgeries, they give them more rest and allow relief pitchers to pitch more innings. Fans complain now almost as much about teams over-using pitchers as they used to complain about pitchers' being too sensitive. Reversing this trend may mean returning to an era when Sandy Koufax had a brilliant career that ended after a few short years.

But the new rules and experiments Manfred is toying with to address what he sees as the problem would alter the game more than anything since the 19th century. They include adding a 20-second pitch clock, shortening the season, making intentional walks automatic, outlawing defensive shifts, or limiting the number of relief pitchers that can be used in a game.

You may have also noticed already that Manfred's goals contradict one another. More scoring typically lengthens a game. It certainly lengthens an inning and it causes managers or catchers to interrupt the flow and visit the mound more often. It causes more pitching changes. More action — like stealing a base — often slows the game down, by causing a pitcher to throw to first and police the runner.

But this also fits in with the same weird push-pull that has accompanied other recent reforms in baseball. Baseball tried discouraging batters from stepping out of the box and adjusting themselves in ever-more elaborate routines between pitches. This can shave a few minutes off the game, but generally speaking, a more brisk pace favors the pitcher.

At the same time that baseball cracked down on these pre-swing rituals, it expanded the use of replay, and now most baseball games feature a few minutes in which everyone is watching four umpires standing on a field and wearing headsets, as they wait for the hidden umpires at MLB HQ in Chelsea decide the call.

We don't always understand what causes changes in baseball. The designated hitter was instituted to boost offense in the American League. And it does that. But it also became a kind of safety valve for general managers, who would sign a slugger to a contract that was too lengthy, and justify it to themselves saying that when this player declined defensively, they could be stuffed into the designated hitter spot.

Two years ago, baseball was in the midst of a record ebb in offensive numbers. It seemed like the dawn of a new strikeout era. Now, suddenly, since late last season, home runs are on the rise to such a degree that journalists openly speculate about whether the baseball itself has been altered. There are evolutions in player development, training, and even medicine that change the game and are hard to predict. The same is true for front-office strategy. For years, teams were tempted to copy the attrition-style baseball pioneered by the Yankees and Red Sox teams of the last decade. But last year the Royals played exactly the kind of put-it-in-play style that should make Rob Manfred swoon, and they won the World Series. Imitators are likely to follow.

The 20-second pitch clock is by far the worst suggestion. It has already been instituted in the minor leagues, as a kind of experiment and to train developing pitchers to a faster pace of play. However, it entirely spoils baseball's unique, pastoral feel. It is very difficult not to watch a clock ticking down to zero, and if the clock becomes a part of the game — if it changes the outcome of at-bats — it will have to be televised. Baseball will quickly resemble looking at an endless series of noshes being microwaved.

And baseball has to be careful about what premises are enshrined in new reforms. There is a reason that slopes become slippery. Sometimes we reform the rules of an institution hoping for just a tweak, but then we find that we have instead enshrined a new principle that re-orders the game. That is why the designated hitter must never be introduced to the National League on the basis that it generates better offense. That reform alone would open baseball to sliding towards footballization, with separate defensive and offensive squads. And in turn, it would separate the modern game too dramatically from its past.

Baseball also has to be careful not to give too many new duties for umpires to handle. Policing the pitch clock, or the exact positioning of defensive players on the field, can incidentally create more dead time. And it can make baseball harder to enjoy as its prohibitions become ever more elaborate and forbidding to the uninitiated.

We had Fields of Dreams, but my fields are filling with nightmares. Do we really want to watch umpires standing on a field, with headsets, waiting to hear from other umpires in Chelsea whether the radar detected an illegal move by a second baseman in the second before a pitch was delivered? Is this a faster game? Is this a game with more action?

If you want more offense and you want to activate more fans, I have a simple and time-honored adjustment: expansion. Add two, or four, more teams to the league. This will harness new fans who are carried along by civic pride to their nearby ballparks. It will dilute pitching talent for several seasons, leading to a likely increase in offensive production. If you want a diverse fanbase, stay in cities like Oakland that have a diverse population, and invest more money developing baseball in urban areas. And finally, market the stars of the game. The most recognizable baseball players right now are either retired, like Derek Jeter, or retiring later this year, like David Ortiz. Spend some money making Andrew McCutchen and Bryce Harper household names.

While several Olympic sports could lay claim to being the quirkiest or most underappreciated in Rio, only one stands out for having a name that doth protest its relevancy a bit too much: the modern pentathlon.

The sport is the jumbo shrimp of the Games, an oxymoronic enterprise that measures an all-around athleticism better suited for life before the Model T started rolling off the assembly line. After all, there isn't much that feels contemporary about a competition that counts horseback riding, fencing, and shooting among its five elements.

There are of course reasons for the design of the contest, which also includes running and swimming. The "modern" moniker makes more sense when you consider that it was meant to distinguish the event from its counterpart in the ancient Greek Olympics. The original pentathlon, introduced in 708 BC, brought together a constellation of sports that included running, long jump, spear throwing, discus, and wrestling. The climactic event, its winner was victor ludorum ("winner of the Games").

Still, more than a century later, the pentathlon persists. Tweaks have been made to the rules over the years, many with an eye toward making it feel more current and fan-friendly. The women's competition was added at Sydney in 2000. Running and swimming distances have been shortened. Laser shooting has replaced real guns, and running and shooting have been combined into one event. The entire thing has been compressed from five days to four days to, essentially, one day each for the men and women. Starting in Tokyo, plans call for the entire pentathlon to take place in a single stadium, over no more than five hours.

The caveat to the one-day competition in Rio is a preliminary fencing round on Aug.18. The pentathletes each face one another in a series of high-pressure, one-minute bouts that determine the rankings for the main competition. (Seventy-two athletes participate, split between the men's and women's sides.) Points are awarded based on an athlete's performance during the individual bouts as well as their overall win rate.

Points are everything in the modern pentathlon. They are added to and subtracted from an athlete's score over the course of the multi-part competition, and are the basis by which his or her handicap is calculated before the final event, running and shooting. The more points you have, the bigger the head start you're given.

The main day of competition begins with a 200-meter freestyle swim, followed by a fencing knockout round; the two lowest-ranked athletes face each other to start, with the victor moving up the ladder to face the next ranked athlete, and so forth. Next comes horse jumping, which involves clearing 12 obstacles in a fixed time, with a twist: The horses are assigned to the athletes at random, so no one has familiarity with their steed beforehand.

Final scores are then calculated, and the athletes are assigned their start times for the last event, running and shooting. The 3,200-meter course features four stops along the way for target shooting. An athlete can start running again once he or she has hit the target five times, or when 50 seconds have passed. The gold goes to the first person across the finish line.

The U.S. women haven't earned a medal in the modern penthathlon since 2000, but Margaux Isaksen will be looking to change that. In 2008 she finished in 21st place, and in 2012 she jumped to fourth, missing the bronze by just two seconds on the final run. (Her younger sister, Isabelle, is also competing.) Among the other big contenders are defending gold medalist Laura Asadauskaite of Lithuania; England's Samantha Murray, who took silver in London; Germany's Lena Schoneborn, the gold medalist in Beijing; and Brazil's own Yane Marques, who took bronze in London.

With a ranking of 40th in the world, Team USA's Army Sgt. Nathan Schrimsher isn't likely to break into the top three. The better bets are defending gold medalist David Svoboda of the Czech Republic; reigning world champion Pavlo Tymoshchenko of Ukraine; Russia's Aleksander Lesun; China's Cao Zhongrong, who took silver in London; Hungary's Adam Marosi, who took bronze in London; and Egyptian brothers Amro and Omar El Geziry.

Floating down a river might be the ultimate vacation. It's also not for the faint of heart.

Rafting is sort of an elaborate simulacrum of a pre-industrial state of nature. All your clothes, food, and cooking gear has to be packed on the boats. You sleep in a tent, or simply on the ground. A steep canyon means virtually no cell phone reception — and spectacular cliffs and scenery. You sleep with the sun, going to bed when it's dark and getting up when it gets light.

It's all the remoteness and self-sufficiency of backpacking, but you can carry far more stuff (for example, a big cooler full of drinks). You connect with nature in a very real way while enjoying a frankly absurd level of comfort. But there's also not an insignificant element of danger.

I should mention that I'm a little biased. Both of my parents were once professional river guides, running wooden dories for environmentalist legend Martin Litton down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. They met on a commercial trip, when my dad was a guest boatman angling for a permanent job and my mom was working as a cook. He was two hours late at the start, but redeemed himself in my mother's eyes when somebody dropped the firepan in the river and he did a perfect swan dive after it into the frigid water. He rescued the pan and got the job. A bit later, my mother would become only the second woman ever in Grand Canyon to become a professional dory guide.

The author and his parents rafting on the Colorado River in 2013: approaching Lava Falls with his dad (left); his mom rows solo in Hermit Rapid (right). (Ryan Cooper)

With parents like mine, I've been running rivers literally since before I was born — at 5 months pregnant with me, my mother swam the notorious Crystal Rapid in Grand Canyon when her friend flipped the boat. At 4 years old, I ran the Dirty Devil in an inflatable Metzeler canoe with my parents. My dad, a skilled carpenter, made me my own little wooden paddle so I could help out. At 14, I ran the Grand Canyon for the first time, and got to swim Crystal for myself when my mom flipped my sister and me once more. At 17, I rowed my own boat through the canyon, again with my mom. (I didn't flip that time, but got close enough once that we both fell into the river.) In between were a slew of trips on the Snake, the Yampa, the Arkansas, the Green, the Colorado, the San Juan, the Dolores, the Rogue, the Grand Ronde, the Zambezi, and others.

But on each of those trips, somebody had to personally navigate each boat down the river. That is no small task.

In order to row a whitewater boat, you must be able to anticipate where you want to be and how to get there. Rivers are not straight, and there are constant changes in the current, from water boiling up from the bottom to eddies where the current goes upstream for a moment. These changes in the current are visible on the river surface through patterns of movement and ripples, allowing you to predict what will happen. With a bit of practice, you can learn to "read" the water, and know where to go and what to avoid. With a lot of practice, you get a intuitive feel for the water — knowing instinctively when to stroke slightly harder on one side, when to gently drag one oar, when to twist the oar handle to keep a wave from knocking it out of your hand, and so on.

All this comes together in the rapids, the most dangerous and exciting part of the trip. Rivers slowly descend on their way from the ocean to the mountains — but are often blocked up by debris flows from flooding side canyons, leading to short, steep drops. Rocks in the stream bed create obstacles in the rapid, either sticking fully out of the water or below the surface. The latter variety are either barely below the surface, creating "pourovers," or a bit further down, creating a "hole," a permanent standing wave where the river folds back on itself.

Skill in reading water can allow you to pick a route through the rapid, but should you make a mistake, you're liable to get the boat stuck on a rock, or flip it over in a hole.

That flip in Crystal 16 years ago remains to this day the single most violent experience of my life. The boat was sideways, and I was on the downstream side, so when we hit the big hole, I got several tons of water smashed right in the chest. My sunglasses and shoes were gone in an instant. A quarter-second later, I got sucked under the boat at high speed, bouncing along the rigging, which tore a huge chunk of flotation out of my life jacket and sliced open my head right above my right eye. Luckily, there was a doctor on the trip, who taped it shut with a butterfly bandage, leaving my eye half-closed for the next week. For the rest of the trip, they called me "one-eyed Jack."

That experience weighed on my mind this summer when I began a trip down the Salmon River with my mother. Usually my dad would accompany us on this kind of trip, but he had another booked, so this time it was just the two of us. Lots of rowing tends to make her arthritis act up these days, so I took the oars.

At first, the boat felt a bit unfamiliar and awkward. I kept failing to predict exactly where the river would take me, and having to rely on my strength to get into the right place. Muscle is useful on the river, but it can also be a crutch. The mark of real skill is efficiency of effort — being able to put the boat precisely where it needs to be without seeming to work for it. I was flailing by comparison.

But after a few days, it started coming back. At a certain point, everything clicked back together, and moving the boat became a simple instinct, like an extension of my body. I am too much of a dilettante to be a real expert in anything, but I've been rowing whitewater since I was born. Relative to the average, I'm better at that than I am at anything else.

That experience of mastery — put towards successfully navigating real danger — all in a gorgeous setting, plus good company, is what a river trip is all about.

The Olympic Charter outlines the driving philosophy behind the Olympic Games: to create an event "without discrimination of any kind, such as race, color, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion."

It's a beautiful sentiment. And the Olympics always fails to live up to it.

Instead, the Olympics are nearly always bound inextricably to the problems plaguing the world and era they occur in, with the Games often betraying whatever global anxieties we're consumed with.

In the sixth installment of the modern Olympics, for instance, international politics quickly disposed of the IOC's vision of a politics-less Games. Stockholm won the rights to host the 1912 Games by striking a deal with Berlin, the German capital, where the latter would be guaranteed the 1916 Games. But after Gavrilo Princip's fateful shot sparked World War I in 1914, Germany found itself aligned with the Central Powers and the 1916 Games were cancelled due to war.

World War I ravaged Europe. At least 8.5 million fighters perished, and nearly an entire generation of young men was lost to war. The tiny European nation of Belgium, caught between larger powers like France and Germany, lost more than 13,000 members of its mobilized forces during World War I, a casualty rate of nearly 35 percent. The country's occupation by Germany during the war was so devastating it came to be known as "The Rape of Belgium," wherein German forces violated Belgian neutrality en route to killing more than 5,000 civilians.

When the Olympics resumed in 1920, the Games were awarded to Antwerp, Belgium, in a move intended to memorialize the trauma inflicted upon the country during World War I. The war's losing Central Powers — Germany, Turkey, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria — were not invited to attend.

Despite suffering from an unfinished stadium and sparse attendance due to post-war economic woes, Belgium was praised for its resilience and embodiment of the Olympic spirit by hosting the Games. "Naturally, the nations like England, France, Belgium, Canada, and Australia are still feeling the ravages of the World War," The New York Timeswrote on Aug. 25, 1920, in the middle of the Games. "However, they have shown wonderful recuperative powers."

War continued to be an influential factor in Olympic history, most notably during the 1936 Games, which were awarded to Berlin in a gesture meant to soothe leftover tensions from World War I and welcome Germany back into the international fold. But the IOC made that decision in 1931, two years before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power; by 1936, Hitler had turned Germany into a cesspool of racial hatred on the verge of mass genocide. The watching world balked as the Nazis prepared for the Olympics by deliberately scrubbing Berlin of its most overt anti-Semitic imagery and banning Jewish athletes from the German national team.

Calls to boycott the Games grew loud, led by the U.S. and U.K., but the movement eventually crumbled. Germany went on to win the most medals at the Berlin Games, and the success "dulled the opposition to [Hitler] that had clearly been quite evident up to 1936," Carnegie Mellon University history professor Barbara Burstin told Time earlier this month. Nazi Germany invaded Poland almost exactly three years later.

The legitimacy lent to Nazi Germany by the 1936 Olympics helped lead to World War II — which, in turn, led to the cancellation of the 1940 Games, scheduled to be held in Tokyo, and 1944 Games, set to be hosted in London. The "make-do-and-mend" 1948 Games in London were the world's second attempt to reset after an all-consuming crisis, and the Olympics' return for the first time since 1936. Axis powers Germany and Japan were banned from competition, and postwar economic turmoil led to the moniker "The Austerity Games," with London's Olympics deemed a stripped-down-but-successful event.

But the 1948 Games reflected the world's no-frills mood: As Historynoted, no new venues were constructed for the 1948 Olympics, many local athletes simply commuted from home to their events via public transportation, and rationing drove many competitors to make their own uniforms. When the Games closed, the Manchester Guardianboasted: "Right from the start, it was made clear to the athletes that this time there was to be no glorification of any political system, any nation, any color," likely a thinly-veiled reference to Hitler's stage-setting 1936 Games.

Perhaps no two Games better captured the world's problems than the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City and the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Throughout the 1960s, the U.S. struggled with racial tensions as the civil rights movement swept through the country. And just as Jesse Owens made a racial statement from the podium in Berlin in 1936, U.S. runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos staged a silent protest after the 200-meter event, thrusting their fists in the air in the Black Power salute.

Smith and Carlos were vilified by Americans appalled that the athletes had taken a such a stand in front of the world; the two men were banned from Team USA. "We knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat," Carlos said in 2006.

In 1972, international affairs crept tragically into the Olympic Village. While the 1960s and 1970s saw Cold War tensions simmer ominously and the Vietnam War trudge on, the Middle East was consumed by the growing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was formed in 1964, and the Six-Day War of 1967 saw Israel occupy much disputed territory, including the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. After attempting a hands-off approach, the U.S. under President Lyndon B. Johnson eventually brokered a muddled resolution through the United Nations that did little to clarify whose territory was whose.

As a result, by the time the Munich Olympics rolled around in 1972, guerilla warfare had broken out in the region and the PLO had established its presence in Lebanon. The Olympic Village, the brainchild of IOC founder Pierre de Coubertin, had long been a melting pot for the world's athletes to mingle in a fun, shared living space. But at the Munich Games, the communal space proved vulnerable to violence. Palestinian terrorists stormed the Israelis' living quarters and took nine athletes hostage after killing two, demanding freedom for more than 200 Arab prisoners who were being held in Israeli jails. The nine hostages died in a subsequent rescue attempt.

The 1980 and 1984 Summer Olympics traded boycott efforts by the U.S. and Soviet Union, joined by respective supportive nations, over the Cold War. (The 1980 Winter Games featured the memorable "Miracle on Ice" victory of the American hockey team over the Soviets.) While Cold War tensions effectively froze after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the granting of the 2014 Winter Olympics to the Russian seaside city of Sochi coincided with renewing fears in the West of an emboldened Russia; Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president in 2012, called Russia the "greatest geopolitical foe" facing America.

Sochi was awarded the Games in July 2007; in October, Russia announced it would withdraw the troops it had kept in the neighboring nation of Georgia after 16 years, retaining only a "peacekeeping presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia," CNN reported. But in 2008, Russia invaded Georgia after claiming the nation was planning an attack, in a move The New York Times said "had wide international implications, as both Russian and Georgian officials placed it squarely in the context of renewed Cold War-style tensions and an East-West struggle for regional influence."

By the time the 2014 Olympics opened in Sochi, the country's anti-gay laws and propaganda led to protests and boycott movements by human rights activists, in addition to protests over the 2008 war. Russian President Vladimir Putin used the Games as a show of strength, spending a record $51 billion on preparation, staging an elaborate closing ceremony — and, as was later uncovered, sanctioning a widespread state doping scandal to ensure Russia would top the Games' medal count (which it did, with 33 medals).

Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, specifically thanked Putin for the "extraordinary success of these Winter Games" when they closed on Feb. 23, 2014. One month later, Russia annexed Crimea.

But in so many ways, the problems of Rio are what the world sees when it holds a mirror to its face.

The world outside Brazil is in the midst of upheaval. Extreme ideology has swept the globe, from Donald Trump's sharply polarizing rhetoric to the Brexit vote to increasing right-wing fervor across Europe. The threat of Islamic extremism looms, with lone wolf attacks joining organized chaos in terrorizing the West. Turkey, NATO's key member state in the Middle East, underwent a failed coup that cost thousands upon thousands of civilian lives last month.

The Olympics cannot escape the shadow of the world they aim to unite. They seldom embody that platonic Olympism, which strives for universal greatness and spirit unmarred by global constraints.

To capture athletes engaging in the exhilarating thrill of extreme adventure sports, Christian Pondella often finds himself in nausea-inducing positions. Like that time he was hanging from a 3,000-foot granite wall in Yosemite. Or the time he was on a slick, sky-high glacier in Tanzania snapping this photo of a fellow adventurer.

As an extreme sports athlete himself — he's an accomplished ice climber, rock climber, and ski mountaineer — Pondella is usually performing his own feat of strength while also trying to get the perfect shot. "Photographing rock climbing you need to be pretty active," Pondella said in an interview. "You are generally carrying a pretty heavy pack just to get to the location — both your climbing and camera gear. Often times you are ascending a fixed rope to scale up and down a cliff to get into position to get that unique perspective of looking down at the climber."

It's a dance Pondella performs — coordinating his subject, the light, shadows, equipment, and frame — all while hanging on the side of a vertical drop. While that's a nightmare situation for most of us, it's just another day at the office for Pondella, working his dream job. "My two passions basically fueled each other — my love for the mountains, getting out on adventures and documenting them with my camera," he said.

What is the price of an Olympic moment? When the Rio Games' opening ceremonies began, we all understood the contract we were entering into: hours of boredom and gobs of mind-melting advertising in exchange for a few seconds, here and there, of shock and joy. The Olympics, in this way, are a lot like life. We have to take in the banal, the pointless, and the painful in order to savor a few moments of triumph.

This is the contract we abide by, and the price we pay. Host cities pay an even higher price, and athletes the highest of all. The deal they make, in theory, is a lifetime of sacrifice and dedication in exchange for a bright charm. Worth wondering is how many athletes arrive at the Games hoping to win not a medal, but a moment.

The Olympic moment doesn't always play by the rules. In the Calgary Olympics of 1988, the figure skating rivalry between American Debi Thomas and East German Katarina Witt — called "The Battle of the Carmens," because both had set their programs to Bizet's opera, the skating equivalent of showing up to a party in the same dress — was all anyone could talk about. No one remembered Canadian skater Elizabeth Manley until she shot onto the ice after Witt's staid, careful performance, a force of sheer exuberance in a night dedicated to steely competition. Viewers thought the best thing the night could possibly yield was a tense battle of will. They were wrong. "Wouldn't it be great if every human being could have a moment like this once in their lives?" Jim McKay said as the crowd roared and roared. She didn't win the gold, but she won the moment.

When it comes to the Olympic moments count, it's hard to beat Bela Karolyi. Karolyi, who legendarily discovered Nadia Comaneci in a Romanian schoolyard and coached her to the first perfect 10 ever awarded to a female gymnast, at the 1976 Games, has been a presence for four decades in a sport whose participants can count themselves lucky if they remain in competition for four years. After the Romanian team's victory served as the highlight of the Montreal Olympics and made 14-year-old Comaneci a global sensation ("SHE'S PERFECT," the cover of Time magazine announced, "But the Olympics Are in Trouble"), Karolyi defected to the United States, and helped make Mary Lou Retton the star of the 1984 Games in the same way Comaneci had been Montreal's star. Nadia Comaneci's Olympic moment came with her first perfect 10; Mary Lou Retton's Olympic moment came when she prepared to execute a vault with the knowledge that anything less than a perfect 10 meant losing the gold.

The networks cameras focused on Retton and Karolyi as he psyched her up before the vault. ("Panda, Panda, Panda!" he chanted, using his pet name for her.) Karolyi's English was broken, but he didn't need to say much to prepare Retton for the apparatus. They were beyond the level of strategy, of complex reassurance. Karolyi only needed to lock eyes with Retton and tell her that she would score a perfect 10 for Retton to go out and do it. So she did.

The relationship between coach and athlete is always in the background of any Olympic event. Sometimes it's visible, sometimes it's not; sometimes we want it to be visible, and sometimes we don't. But the relationships that coaches have with young, female gymnasts — athletes viewers are already primed to see as vulnerable — are often the subject of intense scrutiny, especially when it comes to the question of how often gymnasts are pushed too hard, and forced to endure too much pain, injury, and sacrifice. Even more deeply, the intense relationship between gymnast and coach can suggest a level of control that is not just physical but mental: not just you can but you will.

American viewers' perception of Bela Karolyi has an interesting way of changing from moment to moment: He troubled us when he was the subject of exposés like Joan Ryan's Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, and he inspired us when his athletes vaulted into the kinds of victories we couldn't imagine any other coach producing. Loud, ursine, and inevitably towering over any gymnast he coached, his manner could be read as terrifying in one moment and effervescent in the next, often depending on what perspective you took (and whether the Americans were performing well that night). His ability to unlock his athletes' potential — and to help them reach the crowning moment of the Games — was undeniable. He told them what they could do, and they believed him completely enough to believe him when he told them they were capable of the impossible. Then they did it.

The lingering question this dynamic leads us to is whether an athlete can reach the same heights of strength and self-knowledge on their own — whether they can believe themselves capable of doing the impossible without forming such an intense bond with such a dominant figure. It's hard to arrive at an answer to this question. What seems far more readily apparent is the fact that we really don't want to know. Nowhere is this more clear than in one of the greatest Olympic moments in the Games' modern history: Kerri Strug's legendary vault in 1996.

Kerri Strug injured her ankle while landing the first of her two vaults in the women's team final, and limped visibly as she prepared for the second. Tension filled the arena: Could she vault again? The scores were close; the team medal seemed to hang in the balance. If Kerri Strug herself had any doubts about whether she would finish the competition, however, they were immediately dispelled by Bela Karolyi. "You can do it," he called to her. He had little idea of how severely she had been injured, and no way of knowing how much pain she was in. Those questions didn't matter. "You can do it," he repeated. "You can do it. You can do it. Kerri, you can do it. Don't worry." So Kerri did.

At the time, media outlets and Olympic commentators would make the near-universal claim that Kerri's Olympic moment was so miraculous because she had landed her vault on one leg. She didn't. She landed on two legs, subjecting her injured ankle to the full force of another vault, and then immediately retracted one foot, collapsing onto the mat.

"Kerri Strug is hurt! She is hurt badly!" the NBC commentator announced, sounding almost as shocked as the crowd. "Probably the last thing she should have done was vault again, and now she is in a lot of pain." Karolyi picked her up and carried her to the podium. We had our Olympic moment, but the questions it inspired were too troubling to ask, so we swore we saw something that had never occurred: a gymnast landing a vault on one foot, getting the glory without the pain, making sacrifices without sacrificing her power to choose, having it both ways.

Of all the attributes that make the Olympic moment, this might be the most defining: that we can lift it out of context and ignore its inevitable cost, and avoid even asking what that cost might be.

Thirty-two years ago, the Olympic Games had a profound effect on an American presidential campaign. With a strong economy behind him, Ronald Reagan was running for re-election under the slogan "Morning in America." His ads were full of patriotic imagery and words of confidence. And by happy coincidence, the Games were held in Los Angeles that year.

Even better, because the Soviet Union and many of its satellite states (including East Germany) boycotted the 1984 Games in retaliation for the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games, the Americans pretty much had the field to themselves. The result was, as Donald Trump might put it, so much winning we almost got tired of winning. The U.S. won 83 of the 226 gold medals awarded, more than four times as many as any other country, and 174 of 688 medals overall. The whole thing was so flag-wavingly spectacular that it felt almost like a two-week-long ad for Reagan's campaign. As William Greider wrote that December:

ABC's coverage was an orgy of patriotic hype, jingoistic cheerleading by supposedly detached sports commentators, and a series of minimelodramas in which heroic young Americans struggled against foreigners with strange names. ''The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat,'' as [ABC executive Roone] Arledge would say. The montage of Olympic images delivered an implicit political message: America is back; America is standing tall; America is winning. Foreigners are the enemy, the losers. [Rolling Stone]

The Olympics in Rio this year aren't sending a message that's nearly so explicitly tied to one candidate's campaign. But in their way, they're a rebuke to Donald Trump and what he represents.

If you had the stamina to sit through the parade of nations in the opening ceremonies, you probably noticed something distinctive about the U.S. team — as you would have at every other Olympics. Look at the teams from China or Nigeria or Russia or most countries, and you'll see that most of the athletes look an awful lot alike. The U.S. team, on the other hand, stands out for its diversity. In the U.S. squad, you can see people of all colors who can trace their origins to every corner of the globe. They have names like Ross and Smith and Thompson, but also Gonzales and Wang and Fa'avesi and Nwaba and Pongnairat.

Forty-seven of the American athletes were born in other countries, and who knows how many others are the children of immigrants. This year we saw the first African-American woman to win gold in swimming (Simone Manuel), and the first American to compete wearing a hijab (fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad).

I can't speak for anyone else, but when I watch the Olympics, it's that diversity that makes me proudest of my country, even more than all the success. Yes, it's just sports, and yes, the Olympic committees are corrupt. But it's also a way for us to put on display the America we want to be and to show the world. That America is the black girl and the Jewish girl hugging after blowing everyone's mind with their skills and winning gold and silver in gymnastics, not the xenophobic vulgarian promising to build walls along our borders.

And this gets to what's so deeply troubling about Donald Trump's campaign: Not just that he's divisive, but that what he is working so hard to undermine is the very thing that makes America so extraordinary. The fact that people all over the world want to come here isn't a problem to solve, it's the single most critical source of our strength. We draw strivers and workers and dreamers from everywhere, and in every generation they change and renew the country they join.

That's always going to be uncomfortable for some, and that discomfort will always be waiting for political exploitation. But America's economic and scientific and cultural dominance is a direct product of immigration. It's why we win more Nobel prizes than anyone, and why so many of the companies that change the world start here, and why people listen to American music and watch American movies no matter where they live or what language they speak.

When Trump says that America is a pit of despair where nobody wins, he's talking about the fact that America today looks different from the one he grew up in. And the people who nod their heads and shake their fists at his rallies, who get incensed when they hear someone speaking Spanish, who want to build those walls and ban people who worship the wrong god, they too want to turn back the clock to the way it used to be.

They're right that the country has changed around them. No matter when you're born, the America that exists when you're 70 years old, as Trump is, will be different from the one you grew up in. People will look different, they'll be eating food you find strange, they'll be listening to music you don't like, they'll be talking in ways you can't follow. That's the whole point.

The Paris Games in 1900 were of particular interest to fans of oddball sports — there were lots of wacky demonstration sports being played because the Games coincided with the World's Fair (the 1900 Paris Olympics were also the first year that women were allowed to compete in the Games).

But in the modern Olympics' 120-year history, there have been plenty of other chances for bizarre sports to show up on the international stage. Read about some of the strangest to have ever been played, below.

Apparently between 300 and 400 birds were shot out of the sky for this event, which made its first and only appearance at the 1900 Olympics. Today, they use clay targets that are mechanically flung into the air, rather than, you know, actual living animals.

You know a good way to rake in a bunch of Olympic medals for your country? Host an event only open to your own nationality. The men's sailors 100-meter freestyle swim in 1896 was only open to sailors in the Greek Royal Navy; apparently this was totally fine with Olympic organizers, although historian Bill Mallon called "its inclusion in the Olympic records dubious at best."

Both professional and volunteer firefighters played in the unofficial firefighting competition at the 1900 Olympics, although individuals didn't fight the fires — cities did. Kansas City, Missouri, earned the professional gold medal. Apparently Kansas City was kind of the firefighting champions of the world at the time; resident firefighting legend George C. Hale patented "more than 60 firefighting inventions," Missouri Valley Special Collections writes. "He was also chosen to represent the United States in an international fire exhibit in London in 1893. In front of the lord mayor and royalty, Hale led the Kansas City Fire Department to a first-place victory." Kansas City didn't disappoint in Paris, either.

You know what makes swimming even more exciting? Swimming with obstacles in the way. That is what some sharp Frenchman figured out back in 1900, when 12 swimmers from five nations competed by swimming under and climbing over rows of boats. There is probably a good reason this sport got discontinued, but it must have been thrilling to watch.

6. Tug-of-warReigning champion: Great BritainLast played: 1920

Everybody's favorite childhood game of brute force was included in the Olympics between 1900 and 1920. Apparently people miss it, because the Tug of War International Federation applied for their sport to be included in the 2020 Olympics. It didn't end up making it this time around, but here's to hoping for 2024!

Motor boating is probably one of the less athletic sports to ever make it into the Olympics, which is likely why it was included one time and one time only, way back in 1908 (it was also demonstrated in 1900). But with the sport played on turn-of-the-century powerboats and in a gale, the whole spectacle sounds like it still managed to be quite the show:

Just before the start, Daimler II. showed a fine burst of speed, but just as the five-minute gun fired she developed some trouble, and, after hanging about and cruising at slow speed for some time, she turned and went away down the course without crossing the line. Meanwhile, Wolseley-Siddeley, after waiting for Daimler II., in order to make a race of it, started alone, to be followed, however, shortly afterwards by Camille. Wolseley-Siddeley finished her second round in 18 min. 8 sec., this representing a speed of 26·6 knots, which was as much as could be expected on such a day, and, as she had then nearly lapped 230 Camille, it seemed safe to conclude that the third gold medal would also go to an English-built boat. But it was not to be. The tide was rather past half-ebb, and Wolseley-Siddeley getting too close to Hamble Spit went high and dry on the soft mud, and so eliminated herself from the contest. Daimler II. meanwhile had retired, and so Camille was left to finish alone, which she did at a speed of nearly 18 knots. [...] This finished the racing, which had proved most disappointing from both the record-breaking and spectacular points of view, but which furnished another instance of what can be got out of modern boats when handled with skill, nerve, and determination. [The Fourth Olympiad: London]

This sport was played exactly like it is in gym class — scramble up the rope as fast as you can (okay, early competitors got points for "style" too, which might have been a finer artistic point overlooked by your P.E. teacher). Perhaps the coolest thing about rope climbing was that the final gold medal went to U.S. gymnast George Eyser, who won with a wooden leg.

If obstacle-course swimming isn't your cup of tea, then perhaps underwater swimming races are? Athletes got points for how long they stayed underwater; however, the sport was so unpopular that they didn't continue it at the next Olympics. For the record, Devendeville won by swimming 60 meters underwater in 68.4 seconds.

This odd sport is more commonly known as "vaulting." Riders at the Olympics had to perform moves both with the horse stopped and at a canter, as well as with a saddle and bareback. There have been several attempts to get vaulting included once again in the Olympic Games; it was demonstrated at the 1984 and 1996 Olympics. Nowadays, though, gymnasts simply stick to the pommel horse and the vault for these sorts of feats.

How does one compete at hot air ballooning, exactly? Good question — apparently judges at the one and only hot air ballooning Olympic demonstration event gave points to contestants for distance, duration, elevation, and, uh, stopping. Sixty-one men and three women competed for the medals, all of which ultimately went to the French. The event was banned from returning to the Games because it was considered a motorized sport.

While you might be picturing a New York City yellow cab racing through the streets of Paris, keep in mind this was the turn of the century — cars were a startling new invention (and one can't imagine they actually raced very fast). The 14 vehicles in the race "had to complete a course of 30 km round Vincennes twice a day. Prizes were awarded in four categories, divided by type of car and propulsion," The International Society for Olympic Historians reports.

If you're only any good at lifting things with one hand, then the inaugural one-handed weight lifting event at the 1896 Olympics were for you. Lifters had to pick up weights with each hand successively, however; second and third place medalists almost tied, except Greece's Alexandros Nikolopoulos failed to lift 57 kg with his other hand, giving a silver to Denmark's Viggo Jensen. The top spot on the podium went to Launceston Elliot of Great Britain, and was the nation's first gold medal ever.

Yes, ballet on skis is a thing, and yes, it's as absurd as it sounds. (It is truly better watched than described — trust me, this is a YouTube hole you want to go down). Unfortunately, ballet skiing was short lived at the Olympics — it only made an appearance as a demonstration at the 1988 and 1992 Olympics, and it didn't exactly garner the widespread popularity its proponents might have hoped for. "It was not received well [in 1988], and I would venture to say that from that moment on, it was probably doomed. It didn't do well with TV ratings, it didn't do well with respect to how it was viewed and reviewed. Which is not to say that there wasn't some great ballet skiing that happened," aerialist Jeff Chumas told Grantland in an essential history of the sport.

There isn't a whole lot of skill involved with this one; basically, you just want to sink as deep as possible when you hit the water (you aren't allowed to wiggle or move in any way to encourage sinking). That is why plunge diving was eventually removed from the Olympics; it ended up depending more on an athlete's weight than, well, talent. "The stylish-stout chaps who go in for this strenuous event merely throw themselves heavily into the water and float along like icebergs in the ship lanes," The New York Times harumphed in 1930. Alas, the event lived and died at the St. Louis Olympics.

The U.S. Olympics Committee says four U.S. swimmers, including gold medalist Ryan Lochte, were robbed at gunpoint in Rio early Sunday. The robbery occurred when Lochte and teammates Gunnar Bentz, Jack Conger, and Jimmy Feigen, were headed to the Olympic Village and the taxi they were in was stopped by a group of people posing as armed police, said USOC spokesperson Patrick Sandusky. The attackers demanded the swimmers hand over their money and belongings.

"And then the guy pulled out his gun, he cocked it, put it to my forehead and he said, 'Get down,'" Lochte told NBC News. "And I put my hands up, I was like 'whatever.' He took our money, he took my wallet — he left my cell phone, he left my credentials."

Sandusky said all four athletes are now "safe and cooperating with the authorities."

Alex Rodriguez will have his last at-bat for the Yankees, and likely as a Major League ballplayer, on Friday. He is not going out limping like many greats, or going out after a long series of commemorations and celebrations like his former teammates Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter. The end of his Yankee career can be described with the same word that always seems to be applied to the way A-Rod presented himself: forced.

It is like a divorce being reported in the society pages. Alex Rodriguez was the trophy wife who once made the Yankees too excited, too loose with their wallet, and too emotional to cope with everyday life. And now, the Yankees are looking for emotional closure, and achieving it by sending A-Rod away with the balance of their pre-nuptial agreement.

There's something sad and squalid about the whole business. Alex Rodriguez seems to be hated by fans, by sports media, and by his own bosses in a way that is totally disproportionate to his offenses.

Rodriguez was the best baseball player of his generation. His 696 home runs put him just behind Barry Bonds (762), Hank Aaron (755), and Babe Ruth (714), making him one of the best sluggers of all time. But for half of his career, Alex Rodriguez also played the premium defensive position, shortstop. He only moved to third base to give room to the inferior defender Jeter, a player who was loved in a way that was disproportionate to his accomplishments.

But why was A-Rod so hated? Other players failed to live up to sky-high expectations and were forgiven and even embraced by fans. Other PED cheats served their penalties and were welcomed back to the game, with their accomplishments noted. Other star athletes lie; fans see it as the norm for famous people. Other ballplayers date actresses and models; they are admired for it. A-Rod was hated all the way down.

The Yankees very churlishly left A-Rod's impending milestone accomplishments out of their media guides last year. They tried to renege on their contractual obligation to pay him bonuses for achieving them. Eventually they worked out a scheme for donating the bonuses to charity.

Perhaps because of the record-setting contracts he signed, perhaps because he was a big star who never was loved by any fanbase at all, Rodriguez became the scapegoat for an entire baseball culture that looked the other way during the steroid era. The team officials, who knew what their players did to get an edge, averted their eyes. The fans, who watched former string-bean stars turn into swollen body builders, bought more season tickets and merchandise in response. The apparel companies and sports cable networks marketed baseball by saying, "Chicks dig the long ball." And a commissioner's office didn't ask too many questions so long as the rising gate receipts and television revenues kept team owners happy.

The price of looking the other way was the creation of a culture that corrupted and then destroyed utterly the reputations of two of its best ever players, Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. Bonds acted like a surly jerk in the end, and his cheating seemed to grow out of a straightforward resentment at the overnight slugging sensations of the 1990s.

But something else was at work with Alex Rodriguez. It was as if fans and the media perceived very quickly that Alex Rodriguez, unlike other super athletes in an era of super athletes, had two obvious and intertwined vulnerabilities: a deep unselfconscious love for the game he was so good at and a crippling self-consciousness for how he was perceived.

Rodriguez knew that people watched him with suspicion. Even the knowledge of this changed the way he moved through the world and especially on a baseball field. Just the awareness of the audience's intense scrutiny gave him a rehearsed look. It seemed as if his stretching routine in the on-deck circle had been choreographed and workshopped extensively in front of an mirror in an expansive home gym. Or perhaps even with a home video-camera. When you think about it, that's exactly the way both an unforgivable narcissist and an adorable kid would do it. Both act in the hope of being great and recognized as great.

A-Rod was quick to give other players help. Because he loved the game he would, unlike most ballplayers, watch other teams play or a DVR of the innings he just played. He would offer compliments to the broadcasters for their good calls.

"I do want to be remembered as someone madly in love with the game of baseball," he said during the abrupt and tearful announcement of his retirement. "I tripped and fell a lot… and kept getting up.”

He did. And looking back, I feel guilty for ever rejoicing in the times he fell. He was fully complicit in his shortcomings. But as a fan, I was complicit in them too. I should have appreciated his talents more when he he had the full use of them, and I should have blamed professional baseball more for the faults he had, the faults that we all encouraged.

There's some truth to these criticisms. But they're easy enough to refute, too. You need big money to put on big sporting events, cities choose (and, in fact, beg) to host the Olympics, and doping is no more nor less prevalent in the Olympics than in other major world sports.

Look, I'm an unabashed lover of the Olympics. They are a delight to watch and enjoy. Relax. Have some fun. Because the Olympics are great.

Here are a few reasons why:

The Olympics are exciting, captivating, and inspiring. Why do we watch sports? Because we want to watch great feats of athleticism. It's extraordinarily captivating to watch our fellow humans push through the limits of the body and mind. Body and mind are very much one — at their best, sports demonstrate that. They offer a window into the overwhelming realm of human possibility. The Olympics shows this more than any other sporting event. Where else do you see all-time world records shattered on a daily basis?

The Olympics offer great stories. Many legends of sport have been written during the Olympics. Usain Bolt's incredible speed. Barefoot Kenyan marathon runners. The great drama of the Soviet-U.S. basketball final in the 1972 Olympics, when the Soviets won by a single point as time expired. Or the great drama of Nadia Comaneci's Perfect 10 in gymnastics. Or that heartbreaking moment in the 2012 Olympics when a South Korean fencer believed she had been robbed of the gold over a last-second referee decision and sat on the field in silent protest for more than an hour while her team lodged an appeal, as leaving the field would mean conceding.

The Olympics elevate amateurs. Very few Olympic athletes are millionaires. Only the ice-hearted could be numb to the romance of the amateur athlete who rises to the height of his sport. Most athletes in the lesser-known sports have day jobs, and spend years, during nights and weekends, training over and over again for a chance, once every four years, at glory. And then one day, they have the chance to walk into a stadium, give it their best, step onto a podium, and wear a medal and hear their anthem be broadcast to almost literally the entire world. They are normal people who achieve the extraordinary. They are, in so many respects, like us — but in this one strange way, superhuman.

The Olympics introduce us to strange sports. One reason why I became a journalist is because it's a job that encourages you to be curious about everything. Everything is interesting. Something similar is true of sports. Every sport has its intricacies, the qualities it calls upon for mastery. Rowers need incredible discipline. Marathoners push the limits of human endurance. Heptathletes need to be amazing all-around athletes. Handball is one of the most exciting, fast-paced sports around, and it's only because of the vagaries and injustices of history that it's not as popular as, say, basketball. Shooting requires nerves of iron. Fencing requires superhuman reflexes. It's amazing to get a glimpse of all those sports, to learn about them and to watch them being played with world-class standards in world-class venues.

Let me put in a last word for my favorite newcomer: rugby sevens. Unlike rugby union, which focuses on strength as well as movement, rugby sevens is a very gracious game, almost all about movement, which it has to be, with just seven players per team.

Rugby sevens is an amazing game that doesn't get nearly enough attention. And the Olympics brought it up from obscurity. And very good for it.

The Olympics really live up to their motto of "Citius, Altius, Fortius" — "Faster, Higher, Stronger." They allow us to experience great stories, and witness some of the greatest human excellence and achievement that it's possible to witness. And they're great entertainment. Don't be a curmudgeon. Relish the Olympics.

The 2016 Summer Olympics are underway in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For the 554 U.S. athletes attending, it's the culmination of years of training and dreaming. But behind the scenes, America's Olympic athletes face a more mundane struggle: How to make ends meet.

Among the countries that participate in the Games, the U.S. government is fairly unique in that it provides no support to its Olympic hopefuls. Between training, equipment, medical needs, travel, and other expenses, trying to reach the Games can be costly. So how do American athletes cobble together the money?

Ibtihaj Muhammad, the Muslim fencer from Maplewood, New Jersey, toldCNN Money she faces as much as $20,000 a year in expenses to participate in her sport, for example. So she and other athletes have to get their money from a wide-ranging network of private entities, nonprofits, generous businesses, sponsors, family support, and everyday donations.

"There are a few people at the top who have true brand power, and can move product and make a difference for a brand," Jack Wickens, a board member of the USA Track & Field Foundation, told The Week. "And they get paid pretty well. But the pyramid is very steep."

Sponsorship numbers can be hard to come by. But in an interview with The Week, Adam Nelson — a gold medal shot putter who went to the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Olympic Games — estimated that maybe 100 to 120 athletes globally are able to make over $15,000 from their sponsorships.

Those opportunities can also come and go, as corporate interest waxes and wanes. The result is an often cutthroat sponsorship environment. Even those athletes who do get sponsors can, perversely, find their duties eating into their training. (The hardships athletes often face making a living after their Olympic days are done is a whole other topic.)

The other option is to make money from prizes for competitions. "If you compete and you win everything, you can make a real wage," Nelson told The Week. "But it's all or nothing. Even placing third at every major meet in the world still puts you down at $35,000 or less in prize money."

Just in the realm of track and field, Wickens estimated that 700 to 1,000 athletes in the U.S. have a genuine shot at making the Olympics, and would thus be able to make a living from the sport in an ideal world. But only about 120 people make the Olympic track and field team. "That's an awful lot of people trying to be 'pro' and a very small pie, with a sport that doesn't have a giant fan base or massive TV contracts or a ton of sponsors," he continued. "More than 50 percent of the athletes who rank in the top 10 in the U.S. in the various track and field events are making below poverty money from the sport. So they obviously need to supplement in other ways."

The most obvious route is to get a day job. Again, exact numbers are hard to come by, but given the economic and financial realities, a sizeable majority of Olympic athletes and Olympic hopefuls must juggle training with making a living. "It's hard to hold down a full-time job," Tyler Jewell, a two-time Olympic snowboarder, said in a 2010 interview. "I have five hours a day of training." The time and energy spent earning a living can displace the time and energy needed to train. “I was exhausted,” Andrea Geubelle, a triple jumper in this year's games, told the Register-Guard. She was working as a substitute teacher and volleyball coach until she finally quit to focus only on training. “I hit the (Olympic) standard like three weeks later.”

Many businesses try to work with the athletes. Most famously, Home Depot ran a program for 16 years — in partnership with the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) — in which Olympic athletes could work part-time jobs for full-time pay. The program provided the company a media boost, and the athletes could rely on Home Depot's sponsorship. "I would not be training if I didn't have this job; it's too much of a struggle," Julia Chilicki a rower in the 1996 Olympics who worked at Home Depot, toldTheNew York Times in 2000.

The program was closed in 2009. But other businesses and chains like Anheuser-Busch and J.C. Penney have worked with USOC over the years. In 2015, Dick's Sporting Goods partnered with USOC to give "flexible work schedules with a competitive wage to athletes training to be part of Team U.S.A." Then there are the numerous athletes and local shops who make their own arrangements without fanfare: The only reason Muhammad is able to fence is that the club where she trains subsidizes most of her expenses. "They have kept me going," she said.

Athletes can also try to get their hands on what official assistance there is, but it's not enough. The USOC — a nonprofit organization chartered by the government that gets its money from sponsors, licensing contracts, and donations — is tasked by law with handling all U.S. representation in the Olympic Games, as well as gathering and deploying all the resources necessary for American athletes to compete. But while the USOC collects hundreds of millions of dollars, a lot of it goes to overhead, marketing, and facilities, or is first filtered through the federations that oversee the individual sports — and which have their own costs.

So by the time it's carved up and divvied out, the amounts that actually reach the athletes are oftenpaltry. Only between 1,000 and 1,500 across all the sports get assistance from the USOC. And it's performance-based, so the money tends to go to already proven Olympic contenders, rather than developing ones. Plus, that assistance is usually in the form of insurance, which Nelson pointed out "doesn't cover any accidents or injuries that are directly related to training." For some of those 1,000 to 1,500, there are also stipends to help with training and living expenses, which run up to $2,000 a month at most.

Finally, the digital era has provided chances for new innovations, as athletes can set up GoFundMe webpages and the like. Wickens himself founded a nonprofit called AthleteBiz, which helps athletes network online to find various forms of support, both financial and otherwise. It's the reason Geubelle was able to quit substitute teaching and coaching. "The whole point of it is to help the athletes diversify their income and increase their value for the markets so they're not quite so dependent on this very small pie," Wickens told The Week.

So does all this mean the government needs to get involved?

Nelson noted that England runs a national lottery to fund training programs and support the athletes' costs of living directly. Even "podium potential" athletes can get at least $30,000 a year. "Germany probably has one of the best funding systems available," Nelson continued. "[Most Olympic athletes] actually end up getting government jobs where there's a loose expectation to show up and do some things, and in return you're pretty much given a full job with pension and benefits." And other countries sometimes award vastly higher prizes to medal winners, totaling several hundred thousand dollars.

"I think help from the U.S. government in the form of direct athlete funding, or helping change the structure in which athletes are currently compensated, might be worthwhile," Nelson continued. But he thinks the easiest solution is for athletes to be given a bigger cut of, and more control over, the revenue raised by the USOC's marketing deals and selling of the Olympic brand — all of which will require collective organizing and bargaining by the athletes themselves. Yet no labor movement has ever won concessions without the believable threat of a strike: "Athletes will complain about the lack of financial control as they train," Nelson continued. "But a lot of them aren't willing to take that step, and that's because the Olympics happen once every four years."

As for Wickens and what he hears from people involved in the sports and the Olympic games, "it's probably appropriate," he said, that the American government doesn't fund the athletes directly. "It just doesn't fit with our culture."

The myth of the modern Olympiad is that the quadrennial games are a time of universal brotherhood where petty differences between nations are put aside in the spirit of fair play. But it is only that: a myth.

The 1936 Berlin Games were the Nazis' coming-out party as players on the international stage. The Summer Games in 1980 and 1984 were boycotted by the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively, in a Cold War skirmish. And there was, of course, the "Miracle on Ice," where a bunch of college kids from the United States upset the dominant Soviets in the winter of 1980. But that is all Disney movie material compared to the danger and intrigue of "Blood in the Water."

Taking place almost 60 years ago at the 1956 Melbourne Summer Games, this infamous water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union is the true apex of the Olympics-as-war metaphor.

Like nearly all of Central and Eastern Europe post-World War II, Hungary had fallen under the yoke of one of the 20th century's greatest monsters, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who when he wasn't murdering millions of his own people and sending millions more to the gulag, was setting up puppet communist governments to form the Iron Curtain.

When Stalin died in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality Stalin created, and also partially exposed his crimes against humanity (and the Soviet people, in particular). Khrushchev essentially promised a kinder, gentler communist empire, but that didn't mean he intended to allow any autonomy from his satellite states.

Then-Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy took the change in Soviet leadership as an opportunity to push for reforms. Specifically, Nagy wanted what his people wanted: independence from the Soviet Union. Naturally, that didn't sit well with Khrushchev, who had Nagy removed from office in 1955.

But in October 1956, over 200,000 Hungarians peacefully took to the streets demanding freedom and independence. When the state police began to fire on the protesters, a revolution began. Nagy was re-instated as prime minister, while Soviet tanks guarded government buildings. Sporadic violence continued for more than a week, but for a moment, it appeared the Soviets would back down, and Hungary would realize its intention to leave the Warsaw Pact and pursue its future on its own terms.

It was during this uneasy period of calm that part of the Hungarian Olympic team left the country on a three-week nautical journey to Melbourne aboard a Soviet ship (the rest of the national team would later fly out of Prague).

When the team arrived in Australia, they learned what had become of their revolution: It had been brutally crushed by the Soviets. Over 3,000 of their countrymen were dead. A few days later, Nagy would be arrested, and later tried in secret, then executed for treason.

The Hungarian water polo program has been a powerhouse of international competition for nearly a hundred years, and in 1956 was preparing to defend a gold medal won in the 1952 Helsinki Games. During the brief and ill-fated revolution, ordinary Hungarians had taken to flying the pre-communist tricolor national flag, or simply cutting a hole in the center of the current flag and removing the crest bearing the communist star which had been added post-1949. Hungary's newly-installed Soviet puppet regime ordered its athletes to not carry the national flag at the game, but the Hungarian Olympians — nearly 10,000 miles from their broken homeland — waved the tricolor in defiance of their own government.

It was in this atmosphere that the Hungarian water polo team saw the "CCCP" insignias on the uniforms of their Soviet opponents — the same seal which adorned the Soviet tanks that had crushed their aspirations of self-determination — and they didn't lack for any more inspiration.

After beating the U.S., Germany, and Italy in round-robin play, the Hungarians got in the pool with the Soviets in the semifinals. It just so happens that Melbourne was home to a large Hungarian community, which packed the stands and ravenously rooted against the Soviets every bit as much as they rooted for their ancestral countrymen.

One of Team Hungary's standout players, Ervin Zador, told the BBC many years later that despite the rage born of profound anguish he and his teammates felt over the lost revolution, they weren't going to get themselves disqualified by engaging in wanton violence against the Soviet athletes. However, the Hungarians fully intended to bait the Soviets into losing their tempers, which they did, resulting in numerous penalties and a generally undisciplined performance that the Hungarians in turn capitalized upon.

The Hungarians called the Soviets "dirty bastards," and the Soviets countered that they were traitors. Flailing submarine sucker-punches were thrown, kicks were deployed, but Hungary's strategy worked. The flustered Soviets faced a 4-0 deficit late in the match.

With just two minutes to go, star Soviet player Valentin Prokopov was goaded by one too many Slavic "your mama" jokes from Zador and rose from the water, viciously punching his Hungarian rival in the face.

Blood gushed from the side of Zador's right eye, making the Hungarian look "like he just stepped out of a slaughterhouse," according to one of his teammates. Many in the incensed crowd of spectators breached the barriers, hurling various projectiles at the Russian team, but the well-prepared-for-trouble Melbourne police held them off. Zador was taken for medical attention, and the match was halted, resulting in a victory for Hungary.

When photos of a bloody Zador were circulated around the world, the "Blood in the Water" match became instant legend. But to this day, the Hungarian Olympians insist the Russian team were not the "barbarians" they were made out to be in the press, but merely hard-nosed competitors who lost their cool in a spirited contest.

In the Quentin Tarantino-executive produced 2006 documentary Freedom's Fury, one Hungarian player maintains that while the Soviet government and military were absolutely exhibiting barbaric behavior, the Soviet players had not. Zador would go so far as to say the Soviet players "were as much victims of those circumstances as we were."

Hungary would go on to win the gold medal match, 2-1 over Yugoslavia, though Zador's injuries would keep him from participating. At the Games' conclusion, half of the water polo team refused to return to Hungary — where they would have received a hero's welcome — and instead became political refugees. Zador ended up in California, where he lived the rest of his life, raising a family and becoming a swimming coach of distinction — even training future Olympic gold medalist Marc Spitz.

The Soviets would lead the 1956 Games with 37 gold medals (and 98 medals overall), but Time magazine would name the "Hungarian Freedom Fighter " as its 1956 Man of the Year.

In the quarter-century since the decisive end of Soviet communism, the "Miracle on Ice" and Rocky Balboa's absurd (even by 1980s Reagan-era jingoistic Hollywood standards) pugilistic duel with steroid-enhanced Soviet boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV are probably the most enduring images of Cold War geopolitics playing itself out in sport. But the 1956 "Blood in the Water" match was true high-stakes drama, where the field of play briefly masqueraded as a battlefield.

The photographer had instructed me not to smile. But you can tell by looking at the tight muscles in my face and the white light reflected back in my eyes that it requires total resistance for me not to break into a grin. I was that excited. I was about to go to my very first Olympic Games.

In a few years, I'll have to go through the passport renewal process. I'll be bummed to lose my hard-earned stamps. But even more, I will miss that picture of 17-year-old me — the one snapped on the eve of my first Olympics.

Vancouver, British Columbia, is less than 150 miles from where I grew up in Seattle, but in 2010 it felt a world away. My father, who has done work for the U.S. Ski Association for decades, had been selected from an international pool to oversee the freestyle ski courses up at Cypress Mountain (a mighty challenge, as it would turn out, since there was no snow). For the weekends we weren't in school, my brother and I were able to tag along.

It was life-changing. Even if you're not a sports fan, you should try to go to the Games at least once in your lifetime. It will change you for the better.

Of course, going to the Olympcs isn't exactly easy. Travel is expensive, particularly across continents. Europe has had an overwhelming share of the Olympics, and North America has been known to hog the Games too. Rio marks the first time the Olympic torch has even been lit in South America; it has never made it to Africa. And it won't be anytime soon: The next six years of the Olympics will be in Asia, with the next Winter Games in South Korea, the next Summer Games in Tokyo, and the subsequent Winter Games in Beijing.

But if the Olympics are nearby, you don't even need to splurge on tickets to have a memorable experience. While going to the actual competitions is obviously, well, the point, most people don't just shuttle from one stadium to another all day. Cities want to host the Olympics in part because the Games bring tourists who will spend breaks between events exploring the city.

While you might not realize it watching on TV at home, the city is as much the star as the athletes. I ate my first crêpe from a food truck in a pop-up village celebrating Canada's ties to France; I watched First Nations people work on carving a totem pole; I bought a hand-painted mug directly from the local artist who made it. And then there are the giant stores filled with Olympic clothing, posters, and memorabilia (yes, I bought stuffed-animal versions of all of the mascots).

But with all this emphasis on the host city, not to mention the Games virtually pitting nation against nation, people sometimes criticize the Olympics for bringing out a kind of dangerous nationalistic pride. Yet on the whole, if you spend more than five minutes in an Olympic city, you can't possibly agree. At men's aerials or ice dancing, I cheered for Australia, Jamaica, and Canada, in addition to the United States. My brother bought a beautiful white-and-red Team Russia scarf — despite having no connection at all to Russia.

Many athletes spend their entire lives working to get the the Olympics; the culmination of so many dreams and goals leaves a palpable feeling in the air. And that feeling was summed up every time we bought something from the official Olympic merchandisers and would get a tote bag with the words Go Le Monde — or,Go World.

Then there is that particular feeling of being, for a brief few weeks, at the center of the universe. Televisions set up around the city broadcast the Games. Nothing was more memorable than being in a public square and watching Canada beat the U.S. in the hockey final to win one of the host country's first gold medals of the Games. As soon as the puck was off Sidney Crosby's stick for the overtime goal, the crowd exploded in a red-and-white frenzy. In downtown Vancouver, people hung over balcony railings cheering; cars honked their horns; total strangers embraced in tears.

Since 2010, my passport has taken me all over the world. But no trip was more important than those 150 miles I traveled from my own front door. And while I'm not in Rio this year, every passing Olympics makes me eager to attend the next — maybe, I imagine, I can go to South Korea in 2018, or Japan in 2020.

I'll have a new passport by then, a new picture. But the goal is the same — Citius, Altius, Fortius. Faster, higher, stronger.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin helped revive the modern Olympics, and he is credited as saying, "The most important thing ... is not the winning but taking part." That is what you realize attending the Olympics: It is not about the medal counts, or even really about who gets to stand on which level of the podium. It is about being there, whether you are an athlete or an onlooker, in the press of people of all nations, celebrating what makes us human: our cultures, our languages, our bodies.

The first modern Olympic games were held in Athens, Greece, in 1896. And after the Games' early successes, Olympic organizers decided to create official posters for each edition of the Games for promotion as well as posterity. The first poster wasn't created until the 1912 Games in Sweden. The images that represent the first four Games — in Athens, Paris, St. Louis, and London — are the covers to the official Olympic program or concluding report.

Since the 1912 Games, the host country has designed and executed a poster to represent their Games. Seen all at once, these Summer Olympic posters allow us to time-travel through 120 years of not only Olympic but also world history, revealing the diversity of spirit and culture that is at the heart of the Games. Below, a tour of Summer Olympic posters from 1912 to today.

Everything about the game is fast: seven-minute halves played by seven-member teams whose players streak, pass, catch, and tackle up and down the field. At the Rio Olympics, the men's and women's tournaments will each be played over three days packed with a breathless schedule that resembles a Netflix binge-watching session. Every half-hour, another game begins. In the early rounds, teams will play twice in one day.

The sport, which alongside golf is making its Olympic debut this year, shares the rough-and-tumble, no-pads-necessary attitude of traditional 15-man rugby. The game demands a specialized athlete, as Matt Cleary wrote last month in The Guardian. While speed is the biggest thing, "you also need optimal VO2 capacity, the ability to suck large amounts of oxygen into the lungs. You need to get up when you're down, repeatedly. You also have to make decisions when it feels like your lungs could shoot out your mouth."

Put it all together, and it's easy to imagine sevens becoming a break-out fan favorite of these Olympic Games.

Rugby sevens' appearance at the Games represents something of an Olympic comeback for rugby. The traditional version of the sport was played at four Olympics between 1900 and 1924. The U.S. took back-to-back golds at Antwerp in 1920 and Paris in 1924. The winning streak comes with an asterisk, though: The 1920 tournament was a two-way competition between America and France. Four years later Romania became the only new country to join the fray, guaranteeing at least that all three medals would be awarded.

Suffice it to say, the lack of international interest did not bode well, nor did the retirement of Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics and a driving force behind rugby's inclusion in those early years. There was also the matter of the brouhaha that followed the U.S. victory in 1924, when French fans — who'd been threatening American players throughout the game — rushed the field. A U.S. reserve player was knocked out after being hit in the face with a walking stick, and later, while the American flag was being raised, the national anthem was drowned out by boos and shrieks. Pelted with rocks and bottles, the Americans left the field under police escort. The sport was not re-upped for 1928.

Now rugby is back after a 92-year drought. (The International Olympic Committee's decision to admit sevens came in 2009, when rugby and golf beat squash, karate, softball, baseball, and roller sports for a spot in 2016.) It will also be on the docket in 2020, after which it will be reevaluated.

Women's play will take place Aug. 6–8, and men's Aug. 9–11. The tournaments — which each include 12 teams — start round-robin style, with every team in a four-team group facing each other. The best two in each group, plus two third-place teams, advance to the knockout stages.

The basic rules go like this: The ball can be kicked forward or passed backward or laterally. Teams earn five points for crossing the goal line — what's known as a try — similar to a touchdown in football. They then get two points for a conversion afterward, which involves drop-kicking the ball through the uprights. Players can try for a three-point, drop-kick-goal at any time if they think they're in range. And if a serious foul has been committed when the posts are within reach, players have the option to kick for a three-point penalty goal. (Speaking of which, players who land in the penalty box, or sin bin, are sidelined for two minutes.)

All of this unfolds on a field, or pitch, roughly the size of a football field. It's also the same size as the pitch for regular, 15-man rugby. Hence the need for stamina.

On the men's side, the big contenders are Fiji, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand — but Fiji is the favorite for gold. The team is ranked number one in the world, and took its second straight world series title in May. A podium-owning moment would be historic for the country, as no Fijian athlete or team has ever medaled in the Olympics.

Among the women, Australia, the 2015-16 world series winner, along with New Zealand, Canada, and England, are favorites. The U.S. women, ranked sixth in the world, are longer shots.

One other thing to note about sevens: the costumes. That's not rugby lingo for the teams' uniforms; it refers to actual costumes, worn by the fans, part of the festive atmosphere that's come to permeate games. As the pics from this Sydney tournament shows, spectators turn out as everything from Star Wars storm troopers to hula dancers, cave men, and lifeguards. So when a break in the action comes — brief as it may be — keep an eye on the stands.

The artistic program typically showcases the host nation's traditions and heritage, but this year's pageantry remains mostly under wraps (though word has it supermodel Gisele Bundchen will be strutting into Maracaña Stadium to the tune of "The Girl from Ipanema"). Still, viewers can count on seeing a number of traditional elements, from the parade of nations to the raising of the Olympic flag. Read on for a guide to what's on tap and their historic origins. The show begins in Rio at 7 p.m., though NBC is delaying coverage by an hour.

The Olympic flame

Who's going to do the lighting? That's kept secret until the moment itself — though many say soccer legend Pelé is a good bet. For the Brazilians, his appearance would likely be on par with America's own experience in Atlanta in 1996; that's the year when boxer Muhammad Ali, by then suffering the effects of Parkinson's disease for a little more than a decade, unexpectedly appeared to do the honors. Of course, sometimes the method is as dramatic as the messenger: At Barcelona in 1992, a Paralympic archer sent a fiery arrow into the cauldron to light the flame. And though he didn't do the final lighting, a skier did a soaring jump — torch in hand — before handing it off to someone else as part of Lillehammer's opening ceremony in 1994.

The flame itself is a nod to the ancient Greek practice of keeping fires lit in front of their most important temples, including the sanctuary at Olympia, where the ancient Games took place (the first was staged in 776 B.C.). It was first employed at a modern Olympics in 1928 in Amsterdam, where a flame was lit atop a tower overlooking the Olympic Stadium. The accompanying torch relay didn't debut until the 1936 Games in Berlin, when the torch was symbolically lit in Olympia and then carried through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia before arriving in the German host city. The added pomp was essentially propaganda by the Third Reich — they portrayed the relay as a tradition that stretched back to the original Games — born from a love of "flashy ceremonies and historical allusions to the old empires." Be that as it may, the event took hold as a ritual, and the relay still begins at Olympia before wending its way to the host city.

Parade of nations

Let there be blazers. Polo Ralph Lauren is outfitting Team USA for the fifth time, and this year's installment looks pretty jaunty between the jackets, patriotically striped tops, white denim jeans, and boat shoes. Such sartorial considerations have come to take center stage during the parade, which dates to the 1908 Olympics in London and features athletes and coaches from every participating nation. Other big designers and brands whose work will be on display include H&M (Sweden), Giorgio Armani (Italy), and Lacoste (France).

As the progenitors of the Games, Greece's Olympians will enter the stadium first, while Brazil's enter last. If you want to keep your eye out for a particular country, keep in mind that the rest of the marchers are ordered alphabetically — according to the native language of the host nation. Regardless, it'll be hard to miss the Americans. Ralph Lauren is decking out our flag bearer, swimmer and 22-time medal winner Michael Phelps, with a special version of the uniform: The blazer's back is wired with panels that spell out "USA" in lights. (Revisit Lauren's Beijing debut here, along with other of the U.S. team's interesting turns from years past.)

The Olympic flag

The design of the flag was created by the French aristocrat and educator Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin. Coubertin — who believed sport was essential to developing character, and sportsmanship to cultivating moral strength — founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894 with the goal of reviving the ancient Greek games. He first used the rings in a letter to a colleague written after the 1912 Stockholm Games, and they were used as the emblem for the Olympics' 20-year anniversary in 1914 before becoming the official Olympic symbol.

Happily, the modern oath is taken by an athlete holding the Olympic flag rather than the ancient method of swearing over the entrails of a sacrificial animal. Originally written by Coubertin, the language has been tweaked over the years; the latest iteration was used for the first time at the 2000 Sydney Games: "In the name of all the competitors I promise that we shall take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by the rules which govern them, committing ourselves to a sport without doping and without drugs, in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honor of our teams."

Its opening lines are: "O Ancient immortal Spirit, pure father of beauty, of greatness and of truth, / Descent, reveal yourself and flash like lightning here, within the glory of your own earth and sky. / At running and at wrestling and at throwing, shine in the momentum of noble contests, / And crown with the unfading branch and make the body worthy and iron-like."

The Summer Games in Rio, taking place Aug. 5–21, will feature 42 Olympic sports over 306 events. Here's a preview of nine of the biggest to keep an eye on.

1. Basketball

U.S. men's basketball team | (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

The U.S. men's basketball team will launch its bid for a third consecutive Olympic gold medal when it plays China on Aug. 6. Guided by longtime Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, the team is headlined by New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony and newly minted Golden State Warrior Kevin Durant. Though stars like Stephen Curry and LeBron James withdrew from consideration, saying they wanted to rest after the long NBA season, the lineup still features a roster of standout, versatile players. Nine were 2016 NBA All-Stars; Anthony is the first player selected to four Olympic teams, and Durant led the team in scoring at the 2012 London Games, averaging 19.5 points a game — a U.S. Olympic record. The 2016 tournament begins round-robin style, with the U.S. playing each of the other countries in Group A: France, Venezuela, China, Australia, and Serbia. In Group B, European champion Spain could emerge as the U.S.'s main challenger for gold.

2. Soccer

Hope Solo | (Scott Halleran/Getty Images)

Women's soccer has come to overshadow men's at the Olympics, and the U.S. women's squad may cast the biggest shadow of all. The team is gunning for its fourth consecutive gold medal — and its fifth since the sport debuted at Atlanta in 1996. Of the 18 players bound for Brazil, 14 were part of last year's Women's World Cup championship team, including the 2015 FIFA Women's World Player of the Year, midfielder Carli Lloyd. The 34-year-old is also the team's all-time leading scorer, with 87 career goals. Other stars include goalie Hope Solo, midfielder Megan Rapinoe, and forward Alex Morgan. The tournament begins with group play before progressing to the knockout rounds, where Brazil, Canada, Australia, and Germany could all pose threats. In the men's tournament, teams are restricted to players under 23, with three overage exceptions. Team USA didn't qualify, but Mexico, Argentina, Germany, Portugal, and Brazil are all contenders. Brazil is especially hungry: Despite a record five World Cup victories, it has never brought home Olympic gold.

3. Swimming

Katie Ledecky | (Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

The U.S. swim squad is dominated by first-timers, who make up 30 of its 47 members. They'll need to quicken their Olympic trial times to match Team USA's 31-medal performance four years ago in London. Big things are expected of 19-year-old Katie Ledecky, the world's most dominant swimmer, who won gold in 2012 in the 800-meter freestyle. She holds three world records and has posted the world's best times this year in the 200-, 400-, and 800-meter freestyles, all events in which she'll be racing. Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time with 22 medals, has come out of retirement for his fifth Games. Slower than in the past — but not to be counted out — the 31-year-old will compete in relays plus the 100- and 200-meter butterfly and 200-meter medley. Others to watch include Josh Prenot in the 200-meter breaststroke, David Plummer in the 100-meter backstroke, and Lilly King in the 100-meter breaststroke, each of whom ranks first in the world in those events. The races start Aug. 6.

4. Track and field

Christian Taylor | (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Expectations are high for the U.S. track-and-field team, which features five reigning Olympic champions and five world champions. LaShawn Merritt will likely try to match Michael Johnson's historic 1996 performance — remember the gold sneakers? — with wins in the 400- and 200-meter races. He'll have competition from Justin Gatlin, who'll be sprinting in the 100 and 200 meters, as will Jamaican speed king Usain Bolt. Fresh off a torn hamstring, Bolt's condition is somewhat unknown; Gatlin recently turned in the fastest 100-meter time of the year, at 9.8 seconds. Six-time medalist Allyson Felix surprised by failing to qualify in the 200-meter race, but she's favored for gold in the 400 meters. Other U.S. Olympic veterans who'll be chasing medals include decathlete Ashton Eaton, triple jumper Christian Taylor, long jumper Brittney Reese, and pole-vaulter Jenn Suhr. They'll be joined by plenty of fresh faces, with 77 athletes — almost two-thirds of the team — reaching the Olympics for the first time. At 16, 400-meter hurdler Sydney McLaughlin is the youngest member. The competition begins Aug. 12.

5. Diving

David Boudia | (AP Photo/AJ Mast)

Twenty-time U.S. national champion David Boudia, 27, could be the key to thwarting China's goal of sweeping gold in all eight diving events. The Chinese have come close before, taking six golds in London, seven in Beijing in 2008, and six in Athens in 2004. China's standout female diver is Wu Minxia, who holds six Olympic medals including four golds; if she lands in the top three in any diving event in Rio, she'll set a new record for the most Olympic diving medals. The big names on China's men's team include Qiu Bo, Qin Kai, and He Chong. Boudia squeaked past Qiu to win the 10-meter platform in 2012 and will be looking to defend his gold — a feat not accomplished by an American diver since Greg Louganis in 1988. Other returning U.S. veterans of London 2012 include Kristian Ipsen and seven-time national champion Abby Johnston, both of whom medaled in the synchronized 3-meter springboard and will now compete in the individual version of the event. Tune in from Aug. 7.

6. Gymnastics

Simone Biles | (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

USA women's gymnastics is fielding another powerhouse squad as it aims to repeat the team all-around gold it won four years ago. And with traditional rivals China and Russia in periods of transition, there's little standing in the Americans' way. Two members of the "Fierce Five" who wowed in London are returning: Gabby Douglas, who took gold in the all-around competition, and Aly Raisman, who took gold in floor exercises. All eyes, however, will be on first-time Olympian Simone Biles, 19, the favorite for the individual all-around title. A three-time reigning individual world champion and the reigning world champion on the balance beam and the floor, she's established a reputation for routines of high difficulty that keep her ahead of the competition, even if she has a few bobbles. Madison Kocian, the world champion on uneven bars, and Laurie Hernandez, who excels on the floor and the beam, round out the squad. Competition begins with the qualifying rounds on Aug. 7.

Most fans of the sport are used to seeing five-time Olympian Kerri Walsh Jennings play with her longtime partner, Misty May-Treanor. The iconic pair took home gold in Athens, Beijing, and London, raising beach volleyball's profile in the U.S. But since May-Treanor's retirement in 2012, Walsh Jennings — who will turn 38 during the Games — has played with April Ross, 34, one half of the team she and May-Treanor defeated in the London finals. The new power duo enters Rio as the No. 3 seed, and will start in Pool C. (Each of the top six seeds headlines a four-team pool.) The other U.S. women's team, Olympic newcomers Lauren Fendrick and Brooke Sweat, will play in Pool A under the No. 1 seed, Brazil's Talita Antunes and Larissa França. On the men's side, the U.S. pairings each include one Olympic veteran and one first-timer — and both landed in the top six seeds. Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena headline Pool C, while Jake Gibb and Casey Patterson lead Pool F. The opening serve will be Aug. 6.

8. Rowing

The USA Women's eight rowing team | (AP Photo/Matt York)

The USA women's eight will fight to continue its dynasty when the team hits the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon. The crew is heavily favored for a third consecutive gold medal, having won every world championship title and Olympic race since the 2006 World Rowing Championships. While most of the crew has turned over in that time, it includes two experienced Olympians: Eleanor Logan was part of the team that started the streak in Beijing, and both she and Meghan Musnicki rowed in London. Coxswain Katelin Snyder, an eight-time national team member known for pushing the rowers hard with her shouted commands, will be making her Olympic debut. Possible threats come from Britain and New Zealand, both of which finished strong at the World Rowing Cup II in May. The men's four is also one to watch; two of the crew, Charlie Cole and Henrik Rummel, won bronze in London. The races begin Aug. 6.

9. Triathlon

Gwen Jorgensen | (Tom Dulat/Getty Images)

There's a lot of talent in the U.S. women's triathlon team, but Wisconsin native Gwen Jorgensen seems most likely to claim the gold. Jorgensen, who finished 38th in London after suffering a flat tire, captured back-to-back triathlon World Championships in 2014 and 2015. She also enjoyed an unprecedented winning streak from May 2014 to April 2016 that saw her take a dozen first-place finishes. The other team members are Sarah True, who missed a bronze medal in London by just 10 seconds, and Katie Zaferes, who recently won her first World Triathlon Series title. On the U.S. men's team, Greg Billington, Ben Kanute, and Joe Maloy are considered long shots for medals. The top spots are likely to go to British brothers Alistair and Jonny Brownlee, especially since their main rival, Spain's Javier Gómez Noya, was forced to withdraw from Rio after breaking his elbow in a cycling accident. Triathletes swim 0.9 miles in open water, cycle for 24.8 miles, and run for 6.2 miles. The men race Aug. 18 at Copacabana Beach, and the women on Aug. 20.

Is Brazil ready for the Olympics?Most of the venues are finished, but the Games could be overshadowed by the slew of problems facing the country. Its political system is in crisis: President Dilma Rousseff has been suspended and faces impeachment over allegations that she massaged the nation's accounts, and top politicians have been linked to a corruption scandal involving state-owned oil giant Petrobras. Brazil is also suffering its worst recession since the 1930s, and mass layoffs have caused the unemployment rate to hit a record 11.2 percent. With tax revenues shrinking, Rio's governor declared a state of financial emergency, saying there was no money to pay hospital staff and police during the Olympics — a big concern given the city's soaring crime rate. Homicides were up 15 percent in Rio in the first four months of 2016 compared with last year, and street robbery has climbed 24 percent. Some health experts have even called for the Games to be canceled because of the recent Zika virus outbreak in Brazil.

Is Zika still a threat? Yes, although scientists say that the risk of athletes and spectators catching the mosquito-borne virus is declining thanks to efforts to eradicate mosquito breeding sites. Reports of new Zika cases in Rio state dropped from about 3,000 cases a week earlier this year to just 30 cases a week in June. Still, visitors are being advised to take protective measures against bug bites, like wearing long-sleeved pants and shirts when outside. SC Johnson has partnered with Rio 2016 to make its Off! brand the Olympics' first official insect repellant, and the company will distribute 115,000 free bottles of its product during the Games. But many Olympians and fans remain understandably worried about Zika, which has been linked to Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing nervous disorder, and birth defects such as microcephaly — which causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads.

Have any athletes pulled out of the Games? A handful of high-profile sports stars are staying home because of Zika, which can also be transmitted through sex. Cyclist Tejay van Garderen was the first potential U.S. medal contender to withdraw, saying he worried he might contract the virus and transmit it to his pregnant wife and their unborn daughter. The world's top four male golfers — Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson, and Rory McIlroy — have also opted out. "People just aren't comfortable going down there and putting themselves or their family at risk," McIlroy said. Zika isn't the only health risk in Rio. Olympic rowers, sailors, canoeists, marathon swimmers and triathletes also have to safeguard themselves against the polluted water at the bays and lakes that host their sports.

How dirty is the water? Absolutely filthy. A cleanup was promised ahead of the Games, but the state government spent only $170 million of a pledged $4 billion on the effort, citing a budget crisis. Surf still churns with sludge, and garbage floats freely; in many places, raw sewage flows directly into the streams and rivers that feed Olympic sites. "Foreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap," Dr. Daniel Becker, a Rio pediatrician, told The New York Times.TheAssociated Press found dangerously high levels of viruses and bacteria in the waters. In some cases, the virus loads were up to 1.7 million times the level considered hazardous on a Southern California beach. The U.S. rowing team will wear seamless double-layered unisuits made with antimicrobial material to help protect them from the contaminated water.

What do organizers say about the Games' problems? They concede there have been "teething troubles" but insist everything will be fine. When the International Olympic Committee's head inspector, Nawal el Moutawakel, made her final visit to Rio venues in early July, she said the city was "ready to welcome the world." All delayed construction — including the velodrome, equestrian center, and a $3 billion subway line extension to help transport hundreds of thousands of fans and athletes — will be completed in time, she said. Moutawakel added that Olympians "can look forward to living in an outstanding Olympic Village." But two weeks later, Australian athletes complained that their accommodation had blocked toilets, leaking pipes, and exposed wiring and was unfit for habitation. On the security front, officials say 85,000 police and soldiers will be deployed to Rio's streets, twice the number at the 2012 London Games. "During the Olympics," said Rio mayor Eduardo Paes, "you'll have absolute peace."

How do Brazilians feel about the Olympics? Not very enthusiastic. Ticket sales have been slower than expected, with 1.7 million tickets remaining two weeks before the opening ceremony. Fifty-one percent of Brazilians say they have "no interest" in the Games, according to a recent poll, while 33 percent show "little interest." The same survey found that nearly two out of three people think hosting the Olympics will bring the country "more harm than benefit." Experts say Brazilians would rather focus on their country's many crises and don't feel like putting on a show for the rest of the planet. "It's like if you were ready to clean up your house and do some much-needed renovations," said political scientist Maurício Santoro, "and all of a sudden you have all these guests who might see something you'd rather hide."

Since the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, the event's opening ceremony has always stood apart from other international sporting competitions for its mix of protocol and spectacle.

The Panathenaic Stadium in Athens on the first day of the 1896 Olympics | (Public Domain)

In 1896, spectators packed into the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens were treated to a parade of bands, a choral performance of the "Cantata for the Olympic Games," (which would be named the official Olympic anthem in 1958), a declaration by Greek King George I, and the march of the athletes. Though modest by our contemporary standards, the festivities were quite grand for the time.

In 1920, the International Olympic Committee canonized certain rituals, including the parade of athletes and the torch relay, which provided a ceremonial shell the host country could personalize. Through the decades, the artistic program — the culminating event of the night, kept secret up until the last minute — became the ultimate celebratory spectacle infused with cultural references to the host and era. In recent years, these Olympic festivities have swelled to technological feats of performance, innovation, and showmanship in an attempt to out-dazzle their predecessors. As Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, prepares for its own opening night on Aug. 5, take a tour through 100 years of the opening ceremonies of the Summer Games:

Moscow, 1980 | Performers form into spiraling pyramids on the field of the Lenin Stadium on July 19, 1980, during the opening ceremonies. | (AP Photo)

Los Angeles, 1984 | Bill Suitor hovers with his jet pack over the stadium during the opening ceremony for the XXIII Olympic Games on July 28, 1984, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. | (Steve Powell/Getty Images)

Seoul, 1988 | Dancers form the Olympic rings in the center of the stadium during the opening ceremony of the 1988 Summer Olympic Games. | (Allsport/Allsport)

Atlanta, 1996 | Dancers and a choir perform on July 19, 1996, in Atlanta during the opening ceremony of the Centennial Olympic Games. The ceremony took three years to prepare. | (PASCAL GUYOT/AFP/Getty Images)

The Olympic torch is carried into the Olympic Stadium during the opening ceremonies of the XI Olympic Games in Berlin on Aug. 1, 1936. | (Getty Images)

In 1931, the International Olympic Committee made a gesture of inclusion to Germany, which had been isolated since the end of World War I, by awarding Berlin the 1936 Summer Games. Two years later, Adolf Hitler came to power.

Hitler initially despised the very idea of the Olympics, calling the multicultural event "an invention of Jews and Freemasons." But he soon recognized that he had a unique opportunity to present his Germany on the biggest world stage, and he spared no expense.

Berlin's Olympic Stadium. | (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

By 1936, the dark rumblings of Hitler's tyranny had grown thunderous, as headlines revealed an increasingly militarized and segregated Germany. Jews were being shut out of German society and non-Aryans were banned from participating on the German Olympic team. Many U.S. and world leaders proposed a ban, but after delegates visited Berlin and Hitler made a few nominal concessions (one part-Jewish athlete, fencer Helene Mayer, was allowed to compete for Germany), the ban failed.

Banners of the 49 nations participating in the Games fly in one of the main squares in Berlin. | (AP Photo)

A crowded street in Berlin as the Games get underway. | (Getty Images)

For two weeks in August, Berlin was flooded with athletes and tourists from all over the world. More countries participated in the Berlin Games than in any other Olympics up to that point. Though the Nazi flag was everywhere, Hitler's anti-Semitic and racist policies were largely camouflaged from foreign guests — "Jews Not Welcome" signs were removed from all public places and popular destinations, and the Der Stürmer, the anti-Semitic newspaper, was removed from newsstands.

The ruse worked, and the Games were largely viewed as a success for Hitler's Germany. The New York Times' Frederick T. Birchall had a particularly rosy impression of the host country at the close of the Games: "Foreigners who know Germany only from what they have seen during this pleasant fortnight can carry home only one impression. It is that this is a nation happy and prosperous almost beyond belief; that Hitler is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, political leaders in the world today, and that Germans themselves are a much maligned, hospitable, wholly peaceful people who deserve the best the world can give them."

Three years later, Hitler invaded Poland and World War II began. The 1940 and 1944 Olympic Games were both canceled. Tens of millions of people died during World War II, including 6 million Jews. Looking back at the 1936 Olympics, the photos present a surreal scene where the beauty of athletic prowess mixes unnaturally with the sinister and foreboding insignia of Hitler's regime. Below, a look back at this strange and scary moment in history.

The British team marches toward the Olympic Stadium during opening ceremonies. | (AP Photo)

Jesse Owens (far right) competes in one of his track and field events. Much to Hitler's dismay, the 1936 Olympics were Owens' Games — he won four gold medals, and in the space of 45 minutes, broke five world records and tied a sixth. Owens became a hero, even in Germany's Aryan nation. | (Central Press/Getty Images)

Members of the U.S. rowing team, wearing Native American headdresses, watch their fellow athletes compete. The U.S. rowing team, from the University of Washington, were considered underdogs, but ended up beating out Germany and Italy to win the gold. | (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Adolf Hitler and Dr. Theodor Lewald, president of the German Olympic committee, applaud from the stands on Aug. 14, 1936. | (AP Photo)

Jesse Owens hits the ground and sets a new world broad jump record. | (AP Photo)

One of the heats for the men's 100-meter freestyle on Aug. 8, 1936. | (AP Photo)

At 9 a.m. on a Wednesday in January, Simone Biles was dancing in the middle of World Champions Centre in Spring, Texas, but no music was playing. Clad in black spandex shorts and a hoodie — all Nike, her corporate sponsor — the three-time world gymnastics champion was going through the motions of her new floor routine, while Dominic Zito, the national team choreographer, stood on the sidelines watching her as she sashayed across the mat.

Zito hit play on his laptop, and Brazilian music blared from speakers. The selection was the first indication that the long-awaited Olympic year had finally arrived. Since she aged into the senior ranks in 2013, 19-year-old Biles has broken or tied every record in women's gymnastics and has been called the "most talented gymnast ever." In 2015, she became the first woman to win three consecutive world all-around titles. That was also the year she broke the record for most gold medals won by a female gymnast in a world championship competition. For Biles, going to the Olympics is not so much about winning as it is about not losing the gold.

Biles is frequently compared to the likes of Michael Jordan or Michael Phelps: all-time greats whose legacies transcend their individual sports. This is unusual for gymnastics, which is typically treated as separate from the rest of the sporting world, as an athletic sideshow with uniquely young and small athletes and nebulous rules and corrupt judging. But Biles' superiority is so plain to see that even the uninitiated can understand it.

Today, she and her coaches are trying to crack an impossible-seeming question: How do you end the floor routine of one of the greatest athletes of all time? What pose can possibly say all of that?

Most Olympic gymnastorigin stories sound something like this: Little Sarah had so much energy, so she was enrolled in gymnastics class. Fast-forward 10 years and she's on the Olympic team.

Biles' background hews to this narrative — for the most part. As a youngster, she was extraordinarily rambunctious, climbing and jumping off everything. "I remember when she was in foster care, I would go in the house to visit them," her father, Ron Biles, told me at the family home, surrounded by their four friendly German shepherds. "You had to walk up three steps into the house and Simone would jump from the top of the steps into your arms."

At that point, Ron and his wife, Nellie, weren't yet Simone's parents. They were her grandparents; Simone's biological mother, Shanon, is Ron's daughter from his first marriage. Shanon's four children had been taken from her and placed in foster care because of her substance abuse problems — something the family rarely talked about publicly until Simone's career took off.

Ron first learned about the situation when a social worker reached out to him in August 1999. Simone was 3, and her younger sister, Adria, was just 13 months old. He told the social worker to send the kids from Columbus, Ohio, to his home in Texas. He then had to speak to Nellie about changing the composition of their family. He and Nellie had two high school–age boys of their own; Ron asked her if they could bring his grandchildren into their home. "I needed to pray about it," Nellie said, but she eventually agreed.

In March 2000, Ron flew up north to bring them down temporarily. It would take a few more years for their mother's parental rights to be terminated and for the four children to be permanently resettled in Texas; the older two were taken by Ron's older sister, while the younger ones went to Ron and Nellie. It wasn't until 2003 that Simone and Adria were formally adopted. Simone, by then, was 6 years old.

Since the adoption, the girls have had minimal contact with their biological mother. Simone admitted that it is strange for her to be asked about that period in her life. "It's just kind of thrown at me and it's weird to talk about because I don't know much about it," she said. "All I know is Texas."

Texas is where the life Biles remembers started. It's also where she was introduced to gymnastics, by chance, when she was 6. She went on a day-care field trip to a gym and came home with a note for her parents that said she was talented and suggested they enroll her in lessons. I have no doubt that those coaches noticed her innate gifts — fearlessness, coordination, strength — though Nellie surmised that the note was probably sent home with all of the kids who tried gymnastics that day.

Biles was soon thereafter pulled into the optional training program at Bannon's Gymnastix. "We said, 'This kid's got talent and we believe she's going to learn things really fast,'" said Aimee Boorman, Biles' longtime coach. But her ability to learn high-level skills quickly didn't translate immediately to strong competitive results. Biles, for all of her strengths, had some notable weaknesses. She isn't naturally flexible and couldn't find the right shapes on her leaps and jumps. She also didn't know how to control her immense power, often bounding up and back several feet after landing tumbling passes. And on bars — the most technical event in the women's repertoire — she lacked finesse.

Biles' ambitions were quite modest at first. When she and her mom sat down in 2009, when she was 11 and at the top level in the Junior Olympic system, all she wanted to do was qualify for regionals. "That was her big goal," Nellie recalled. Biles made it to the regional championships, where she placed 14th in the all-around. She did very poorly on bars, but won floor and placed fourth on vault.

Biles' aspirations escalated incrementally. After making it to the final rung of the Junior Olympic program, she wanted to make the leap to elite, which is the level you watch at the Olympics. And once she was elite, she wanted to qualify to compete at the national championships. She was finally named to the U.S. junior national team when she was 15 and in the last few months of her junior eligibility.

According to Biles, her career really took off in 2012 because she increased her training time. Unlike many of her peers, Biles had been enrolled in public school and only trained five days a week for approximately four hours per session. Her 20 hours per week paled in comparison with other elites, who typically squeeze in two workouts on most days, for a total of 32 hours a week. But before starting high school, Biles made the call to homeschool so she could spend more time training. "My hours ramped up," she said matter-of-factly, dispelling the idea that any sort of miracle had taken place at the end of her junior career that led to her sudden rise. To Biles, it was simple math: More hours in the gym meant better outcomes in competition.

Biles' first foray into international competition came in March 2013, at the American Cup in Worcester, Massachusetts. I hadn't heard much about Biles before this. But after the vault, the first event, the focus in the arena shifted to her. She rocketed into the lead by performing the most difficult vault of the meet. Biles stayed in the lead until the balance beam, when she fell and Katelyn Ohashi edged ahead of her. After beam, Biles almost charged back into the lead, showing the powerful tumbling that would become her trademark. Ohashi, however, also hit floor and stayed in first. Biles finished in second.

Biles' placement in her first senior international meet, however, was not what impressed me. When she did her double-twisting double somersault on floor, she finished the twists and rotations so high above the mat that you started wondering if she could stash an extra twist in there. Biles made you think that the crazy skills gymnastics-happy kids dream up while playing "the Olympics" with dolls in their bedrooms — elements like triple-twisting double somersaults — are actually possible.

Something curious happened between 2013 and 2014: Biles went from being a contender for the title to being the inevitable winner. No other gymnast need apply for gold; the rest of the field had all but ceded the title to her. I was at the 2014 world championships in Nanning, China, and I watched Biles win the all-around in person. Nearly everyone I spoke to while I was there — from officials to judges to coaches, regardless of nationality — wanted to talk about the teenage Texan. They were flabbergasted by her abilities, by the seeming ease with which she performed the most difficult elements. What else can she do? Is there any way to stop her?

Short answer: No. Biles can't be beaten. She often has more than a full point advantage over her nearest competitors. That's because, since 2006, gymnasts receive two scores: one for how well they do their routine (a score out of 10) and another that determines how difficult the routine is by adding up the values of the skills. The two scores are then added together, so you end up with scores like 14.667 instead of 8.9 or 9.5 or 10.

Biles boasts the highest start values on three of the four events. On vault, she's usually up by half a point. Same for floor. And depending on the kind of day she has on beam — if she moves swiftly between elements, which boosts her bonus points — she can accumulate close to another half point.

But this start-value advantage she has over the best gymnasts in the world doesn't fully account for the point spread in her victories. After all, at the 2014 national championships, she fell and still won by four points. Ditto in 2015 where she fell again and won by almost five points, ahead of her close friend and national teammate Maggie Nichols, who went eight-for-eight at the competition.

What makes these victory margins possible is how cleanly she executes her routines (not counting the falls, of course). When she tumbles, she rotates easily, landing with her chest up and her arms overhead. On vault, she twists cleanly. She does her full-twisting double back dismount from the beam with her knees together instead of pulling them apart for ease as other former champions have, and even nails handstands on bars, her weakest apparatus. When you add her above-average difficulty to her tidy execution, you get the two-, three-, four-, even five-point margins she's been winning by since 2014.

One potential roadblock that everyone is keenly aware of is the so-called world champion jinx. There's enough anecdotal data to suggest that making the leap from world to Olympic champion is difficult; in fact, the last female gymnast to do so was Ukrainian Lilia Podkopayeva in 1996.

Biles, for her part, seems less worried, at least outwardly, about the media attention and pressure. In a conference call in March, she told reporters, "I've never been to the Olympics, so I don't know what to expect. It's better for me, just like my first worlds.... My third worlds, I knew what it was like, so I was like, 'Oh my goodness.' But this is my first Olympics, and not knowing what to expect is good for me." It's a neat little mental trick.

It seems to be working. At the Pacific Rim Gymnastics Championships, her 2016 debut, Biles was absolutely stellar. She showed an upgraded vault, which will probably assure her the vault gold in Rio. Her bar routine — once her worst event — was effortless; her beam sure-footed.

Then there was her floor, the samba-inspired routine she first learned back in January. It had all of her trademark moments: the stratospheric tumbling, the stuck landings, the playful Marilyn Monroe–style femininity when she mimes an "Oh!" with her hand over her mouth. The edges of the routine had been smoothed out. Biles hadn't quite yet reached Carnival-dancer levels of sultriness, but maybe you can only truly become one when you're dancing in Brazil.

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in BuzzFeed. Reprinted with permission. Meyers' The End of the Perfect 10 was published by Touchstone in July.

My husband and I spent a recent evening walking along the Mississippi — he chasing Pokémon, I not. Towering above us across the river, taking up about half the Minneapolis skyline, was the new U.S. Bank Stadium, a glass and metal behemoth that looks, above all, expensive.

It looks expensive because it is expensive. And it's expensive on the taxpayer's dime. Scheduled to open today, the Vikings' new digs came with a bill of $1.1 billion, with Minnesotans on the hook for $678 million once all construction costs plus 30 years of interest payments are factored in. It's a deal Vikings owner Zygi Wilf and his pals at the NFL accomplished via naked political extortion, warning Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton there would be "serious consequences" in the form of a Vikings exit to sunny Los Angeles if the state didn't cough up the cash.

And speaking of Los Angeles: When the Rams announced their decision to move to L.A. in January, they left St. Louis with more than $100 million in lingering debt from the public bonds the city used to finance the Edward Jones Dome in the 1990s. The stadium won't be paid off until 2021, a feat that must now be accomplished with no NFL team (and no $500,000 of annual NFL rent). Mayor Francis Slay attempted to cast the situation in optimistic terms, but an NFL dine-and-dash is seriously resistant to positive spin.

Yet St. Louisans are, incredibly, not stuck with the worst of all stadium public financing deals. That dishonor goes to either Seattle or East Rutherford, New Jersey, formerly the locations of the Seattle Kingdome and Giants Stadium, respectively. I say "formerly" because both facilities are now demolished, the Kingdome since 2000, and Giants Stadium since 2010. As each city has learned, a stadium need not exist to continue costing taxpayers money: When the wrecking balls hit the Kingdome, Seattle still owed $83 million for its construction costs. Government debt for Giants Stadium was $266 million at the time of demolition and will not be paid back until 2025.

These three may be exceptional examples — Minneapolis for its high cost, St. Louis for its lack of team, and Seattle for its lack of buildings — but taxpayers still get ripped off even in the deals that go "right."

Taxpayers cover, on average, 78 percent of the cost of stadium constructions, even as the NFL rakes in $13 billion a year and team owners typically maintain their own sources of independent wealth. Football (not to mention baseball, basketball, and hockey, whose leagues are just as guilty here) is big business with big money behind it. Why should it get such big subsidies?

Of course, for politicians, the answer is easy: Lots of people like sports, so if you're the governor or mayor whose refusal to comply with a team's every demand is cited as their reason for moving, there's a strong chance you will no longer be governor or mayor. Still, PR benefits don't guarantee a wise financial decision. Stadiums are "big, discrete projects," explains Craig Depken, a sports economist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "They're very obvious. Politicians can point to them. Team owners can point to them. Even fans can look at the stadiums and enjoy them."

None of that changes the fact, Depken adds, that when economists consider "whether or not the subsidies to publicly funded stadiums are worth it or the benefits outweigh the costs," nearly nine in 10 say subsidies should be eliminated outright.

The failings of this crony capitalist dynamic have been noticed within the NFL as well. Asked last month what he would do were he the league's president, Seattle Seahawks defensive star Richard Sherman was quick to point the finger at subsidies. "I'd stop spending billions of taxpayer dollars on stadiums and probably get us out of debt and maybe make the billionaires who actually benefit from the stadiums pay for them," he said. "That kind of seems like a system that would work for me."

Undoubtedly informed by Seattle's public financing nightmare, Sherman is exactly right. Of course, it's undoubtedly easier for him to take that view than it is for, say, Gov. Dayton or any other politician who finds themselves staring down an NFL threat. But a former occupant of Dayton's chair proved it can be done. That man is Jesse Ventura, former Minnesota governor and sports (well, "sports") veteran himself.

When Ventura was in office, he took a meeting with Billy Joe "Red" McCombs, the Vikings' then-owner. McCombs' pitch was not dissimilar from the one Wilf would make to Dayton a little more than a decade later. "Red McCombs came in with nothing," Ventura recalled. "Plopped down in the chair, looked at me with his old Texas drawl and said, 'Governor, I need a new stadium.' And I thought to myself, I'm going to have fun with this.'"

So Ventura replied, "Well, Red, what do you need to see me for? I'm sure there's a landowner out there. You can buy some land and build a stadium. Go ahead. You don't need my approval." This, of course, was not what McCombs sought. He hemmed and hawed about public relations and the high cost of a stadium and its many alleged benefits for a city like Minneapolis, finally explicitly making his ask for cash — an ask Ventura rejected outright, announcing that if the NFL and its fans want a stadium so bad, they could pay for it themselves.

"The real pressure comes from yourself, because it's your legacy," Ventura mused, reflecting on the incident. "And any governor or high-ranking elected official — if a team does leave, well, that'll be your legacy. The only good thing for Jesse Ventura was I didn't give a damn. Because I'm not a career politician. I went there to serve and do the best job I could do for the people who elected me. And the NFL didn't elect me."

Unfortunately for Minnesota taxpayers like yours truly, Dayton did not have the courage to say the same. The subsidy McCombs sought was duly handed over. But hey, at least we still have a team and a stadium. Maybe we can even pay it off before that glass and metal behemoth bites the dust.

When it comes to the Olympics, China is a fierce competitor. "The intention of the Chinese is to win every medal, every single medal," said Jeff Ruffolo, an American who has worked for the Chinese government on sporting competitions.

Girls cheer for their friends competing on the parallel bars during gymnastics lessons at the Shanghai Yangpu Youth Amateur Athletic School on May 4, 2016. | (REUTERS/Aly Song)

China often dominates several Olympic events, including gymnastics, badminton, table tennis, and diving. To get there, China has more than 2,000 state-run schools dedicated almost exclusively to training future Olympians. Though their heyday was in the '80s and '90s — sports-focused schools have seen a severe decline in attendance as the country prioritizes scholastic accolades over athletics — many Olympic schools still enroll Chinese children as young as six years of age.

Below, a peek into China's Olympic-training schools and the hard-working students you may very well see compete in the 2024 games — and beyond.

A boy practices as his coach assists during gymnastics lessons at the Shanghai Yangpu Youth Amateur Athletic School on May 4, 2016. | (REUTERS/Aly Song)

Students at the Shichahai sports school attend a class in Beijing on May 18, 2016. | (REUTERS/Damir Sagolj)

Students practice table tennis at the Shichahai sports school in Beijing on May 17, 2016. | (REUTERS/Damir Sagolj)

A student puts her helmet on during fencing training at the Shichahai sports school on May 17, 2016. | (REUTERS/Damir Sagolj)

A coach helps a girl during gymnastics lessons at the Shanghai Yangpu Youth Amateur Athletic School on March 23, 2016. | (REUTERS/Aly Song)

A boxing session at the Shichahai sports school in Beijing on May 17, 2016. | (REUTERS/Damir Sagolj)

Stickers in the shape of Chinese flags are placed on an achievement board on the wall of a dormitory at the Shichahai sports school in Beijing on May 17, 2016. | (REUTERS/Damir Sagolj)

Girls do handstands during gymnastics lessons at the Shanghai Yangpu Youth Amateur Athletic School on May 4, 2016. | (REUTERS/Aly Song)

Students practice taekwondo at the Shichahai sports school in Beijing on May 17, 2016. | (REUTERS/Damir Sagolj)

Students at the Shichahai sports school pass a poster featuring the school's former students who became Olympic champions, on May 18, 2016. | (REUTERS/Damir Sagolj)

Girls run during a break from gymnastics lessons at the Shanghai Yangpu Youth Amateur Athletic School on May 4, 2016. | (REUTERS/Aly Song)

Russia's entire track-and-field team has been banned from the Rio Olympics. Do other athletes dope, too? Here's everything you need to know:

Why were the Russians banned?Investigators found that Russia had for many years been running a massive, state-sponsored doping program for its athletes. The allegations first came to light in a 2014 German TV documentary, in which whistleblowers claimed "99 percent" of Russian athletes used banned substances, and that Russian officials both supplied the drugs and colluded with doping-control officials to cover up failed tests. One athlete said she had paid the Russian Athletics Federation $450,000 to keep secret a positive test. In a devastating report last year, investigators for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) concluded that Russia had been running a "state-supported" doping program dating back to at least the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It alleged that the country's anti-doping agency — with the help of the FSB, Russia's security services — routinely gave athletes advance notice of tests, bullied doping testers and their families, and intentionally destroyed positive test samples. "It's worse than we thought," said Dick Pound, the report's author. "This is an old attitude from the Cold War days."

Has Russia admitted any wrongdoing?Not really. Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko apologized for the failures of Russia's anti-doping system, but he blamed individual athletes and refused to admit any state involvement. Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Russia's main anti-doping laboratory, painted a very different picture. Now in hiding in the U.S., Rodchenkov revealed that at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, a secret lab was set up in the room next to the sealed-off WADA testing area. At night, Russian anti-doping officials passed athletes' urine samples through a tiny hole in the wall to the secret lab; the tainted samples were then replaced with clean urine and returned through the hole to the testing area. Russia topped the medal count in Sochi, after having finished 11th in the previous Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

How prevalent is doping?Russia isn't the first country with a state-sponsored drug program. In the 1970s and '80s, the Communist regime in East Germany forced as many as 10,000 athletes — many without their knowledge — to take anabolic steroids, a synthetic version of the male sex hormone testosterone. These drugs, which are still the most popular form of doping today, enable athletes to train harder, recover faster, and build more muscle. But they had a devastating effect on East Germany's female athletes, who suffered from side effects including unusual hair growth, deepened voices, and fertility issues. Several Olympic athletes — mainly weightlifters — were caught for steroid abuse during the 1970s and early '80s, but the issue really came to the public's attention when Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics after a positive test.

What other drugs do athletes use?Commonly used banned substances include HGH (human growth hormone), which helps build and repair muscle, and EPO (erythropoietin), which raises the red blood cell count and increases endurance and power. Athletes also use stimulants to reduce fatigue, and diuretics to mask the presence of other drugs. A more extreme technique — one that was employed by the disgraced seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong — is to have a blood transfusion before competing to increase endurance.

How do athletes escape detection?They play an ongoing game of cat and mouse with anti-doping authorities. Anti-doping agencies are constantly trying to identify performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) — and tests for them — while rogue scientists are always developing new ones. And while all athletes are subject to random testing at international events, the system is far from foolproof. Determined cheaters often find excuses to delay tests until banned substances leave their bodies. Several have been caught trying to smuggle in clean urine. Many employ doping experts who show them how to cycle on and off PEDs to reduce the chance of getting caught.

Can the system be improved?One of the biggest developments in recent years was the 2009 introduction of the "Athlete Biological Passport." A constantly updated record of an athlete's physiological condition, including his or her red blood cell count and testosterone level, this electronic document is designed to detect the effects of banned substances rather than the drug itself. But athletes are getting around that by "microdosing" — taking steroids and EPO in smaller quantities, more regularly, rather than in big doses. The performance-enhancing benefits are subtler, but can still mean the difference between winning and losing. And microdosing drastically reduces the risk of being caught. "Microdosing can take an athlete from 10th place to first place," says Max Cobb, director of U.S. Biathlon. "But you're no longer seeing those extraordinary 'Oh, my God, how did that guy finish two minutes faster' moments." Anonymous athlete surveys suggest that from 14 to 39 percent of competitors still use PEDs, yet only 1 to 2 percent a year fail a drug test.

Doping in other sportsAlmost every major sport has been hit with scandals related to performance-enhancing drugs. Steroid abuse was rampant in Major League Baseball in the 1990s and early 2000s, with players suddenly developing Popeye-size muscles and smashing home-run records. In cycling, nearly two-thirds of top-10 finishers in the Tour de France between 1998 and 2013 used performance-enhancing drugs. The NFL has had its own problems, with former NFL quarterback Brady Quinn saying that "40 to 50 percent" use PEDs. But pro football has been the least aggressive of major sports in testing players, with most taking just two or three tests a year — often with advance warning. In 2008, an investigative report by the San Diego Union-Tribune identified 185 NFL players as performance-enhancing drug users, spanning every position and every franchise. Yet none of the players was suspended, and the league did little to follow up. No one in the NFL has ever tested positive for HGH, despite accusations against several players, including two-time Super Bowl winner Peyton Manning. "The policy is completely inept," says Victor Conte, a convicted illegal supplement supplier. "If the NFL was interested in catching players who are doping, they wouldn't be doing the testing the way they are now."

A capacity crowd reacts as the Tigers score a touchdown against Canton McKinley at Paul Brown Tiger Stadium in 2012. | (Matt Hafley)

The Massillon Tigers played America's first high school football game in 1894. Indeed, the love of this game is a birthright. Every boy born in Massillon is given a miniature football at birth. The town's nickname is "Tigertown USA"; the town's motto is "City of Champions." In a community of about 30,000 people, the high school football stadium holds 17,000 — and you can bet it's at capacity during every home game.

A newborn receives a mini football from the Tiger Football Booster Club. For decades, members of the Booster Club have visited maternity wards to place mini footballs in the bassinets of baby boys born to parents from Massillon. | (Chelsie Corso)

Photographers David Foster and Gary Harwood wanted to explore this fandom and the community's commitment to their young athletes. Along with a handful of their photojournalism students from Kent State University, they embedded themselves into the community for four years, watching one freshman class all the way through to graduation. The result is the Kickstarter-funded book Tiger Legacy: Stories of Massillon Football(Daylight Books).

The actual game is just part of the story. "[We] needed to illustrate experiences beyond game action and stadium activities," Harwood said. As a result, readers see the infectious and personal connection Massillon residents have to the Tigers, from a view inside a child's bedroom decked in Tigers colors of black and orange to an intimate pregame ritual shared between a player and his grandmother.

"I think a story like this is timeless in the fact that football and the fandom of Massillon is eternal," Foster said. "You could basically do this project 20 years ago and 50 years from now."

Vinny Keller plays with the helmet and jersey of Shawn Wright. Vinny's father, Matt, was Shawn's Sideliner — adults from the community who offer the players support and guidance. Shawn, who served in Afghanistan, remains close to the Keller family, especially Vinny. | (Caitlin Bourque)

Jean Wilson and Ann Stanforth in 2011. | (Jessica White)

Beau Huffman presents the Rivalry Trophy to fans who gathered for a spontaneous celebration in the center of Massillon after the team returned from a victory over the Canton McKinley Bulldogs. | (Jenna Watson)

Roger Federer is a beast. Coming back from a two-set deficit in the Wimbledon quarterfinals, the Swiss, third-seeded player saved three match points to topple Croatian Marin Cilic in a "five-set thriller."

So far, it was the contest of the tournament. Cilic initially held the lead through the first two sets with his "lightning bolt" forehands, hammering his opponent one after another. But in the third set, the crowd witnessed that "brilliant Federer fightback," writes The Guardian's Les Roopanarine, "his full dazzling repertoire on display as he claws his way back to hold, roaring in triumph as he goes."

Tensions mounted in the fourth set as Federer launched serves reaching 105 and 111 mph into Cilic's court. But Cilic responded in kind, forcing the set-point to volley back and forth until Federer took the decisive win. Though still packed with pounding serves and gripping moments, the fifth set sailed by compared to the "nail-biting" show of the fourth. Federer ultimately won 5-1.

Federer called the match "incredible" and said he looks forward to facing fourth-seeded Milos Raonic in the semifinals. With No. 1 seed Novak Djokovic's shockingly early elimination, Federer could be in line to win his record eighth Wimbledon trophy, giving him his 18th Grand Slam title.

Do yourself a favor and check out The Guardian's coverage of the Federer vs. Cilic match. Les Roopanarine's commentary is as exuberantly whip-fast as the sport itself.

The Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro are less than a month away. Brazil does not seem ready.

There's a political crisis, centering on the impeachment of Brazil's president. There's a public health emergency, sparked by the Zika virus. There's an epidemic of crime. (The New York Timesnotes that by one measure, "in Rio a woman is more than 10 times more likely to be raped than catch Zika," while "men are more likely to be shot to death.") And many Olympic facilities are still under construction.

How on earth did we get here? Let's have a look back at two years of terrible headlines.

It feels like we've barely had time to emotionally recover from this year's whirlwind NBA Finals, which ended with a stunning Cavaliers victory just eight days ago. There's likely trash still littering the streets of Cleveland from Wednesday's massive championship parade. Cavaliers gunner J.R. Smith has only recently put a shirt back on.

But buckle back up, because the NBA offseason is here. And it's the best offseason in all of professional sports.

From the time the victors hoist the Larry O'Brien Trophy until the ball goes up on the new season in mid-autumn, there's nothing for players, GMs, coaches, and agents to do but tinker, schmooze, brainstorm, wheel, and deal. There are emojis. And oh, is there drama.

Before the Cavs' celebratory Champagne had fully dried, former league MVP Derrick Rose was swapping the Willis Tower for the Empire State Building after he was traded Wednesday from his hometown Chicago Bulls to the New York Knicks. Another pair of point guards swapped jerseys in a three-team trade. The Philadelphia 76ers told Louisiana State University forward Ben Simmons they'd select him first in Thursday's draft; the Los Angeles Lakers quickly called dibs on Duke forward Brandon Ingram at number two. And we had only just begun.

What did we learn about the 2016-2017 NBA in just a few days? The top two picks of the draft are lanky, versatile forwards who can dish like point guards, score like shooters, and weaponize their height like centers. The top two teams in the league this year boasted, between them: a versatile forward who can dish like a point guard, a big man who can score like a shooter, and an oversized guard who weaponizes his height with a punishing quick release. The league has decided what's valuable — and now we get to watch as 30 front offices chase it.

The NBA's free agency period is the best one in sports. You might salivate over baseball's Hot Stove Season or the compacted action of hockey's downtime, but in no other league are the proceedings so affected by personalities, personal relationships, ad deals, touchy financial restrictions, and media all at once.

Take, for example, agent Rich Paul. His biggest client is Cleveland's LeBron James, arguably the best basketball player on the planet. And would you look at that — Paul also represents Cavs forward Tristan Thompson, who after a protracted negotiation with Cleveland last summer, landed himself a near-max contract despite averaging just 8.5 points and 8 rebounds the prior season. I'll let you connect the dots — or let James' Instagram account do it for you.

Or we can look at last year's ridiculous, emoji-laden start to the free agency period. Every summer, starting July 1, players who are free agents can sign contracts with teams on agreed-upon terms. But because the offseason starts before July 1, sometimes teams and players agree verbally and then wait until 12:01 a.m. July 1 to actually put pen to paper. Normally, this is fine — but not when there are tweets to read and narratives to thread.

To recap last summer's public hysterics: Coveted free agent center DeAndre Jordan, coming off a strong season with the Los Angeles Clippers during which he led the NBA in rebounding, acquiesced to a seductive pitch from the Dallas Mavericks to anchor their defense and lead their offense. The wooing happened before July 1, so Jordan gave the Mavericks a verbal agreement, which was all they needed — until, as chronicled via emojis, Jordan's spurned Clippers teammates descended upon his house in Houston, talked him into re-signing with the Clippers, and then held him hostage inside his own home until the stroke of midnight, when he signed on the dotted line.

(For extra drama, I must add: Jordan's agent at the time was Dan Fegan, who also counts as a client Chandler Parsons, a forward for the Mavericks who led Dallas' efforts to land Jordan.)

In what other league would players cheekily tweet their multi-million-dollar recruiting efforts?

And as nice as an online platform is for self-promotion, NBA stars are uniquely drawn to media-saturated markets. There's little good reason the Lakers should have had a shot at Dwight Howard, a meeting with LaMarcus Aldridge, or a mention in every major free agent rumor for the last few years. The team is bad, the front office in turmoil, the coaching job a revolving door — but the bright lights of L.A. are always touted as a free agent wooing factor. Part of the reason Derrick Rose, a born-and-bred Chicago kid, can be excited about shipping off to one of the most tumultuous franchises of the past few years is because the Knicks, well, they play in New York. Big markets mean big money, as ad deals come rolling in.

Every year from October to June, we devour on-court basketball in 48-minute bursts of dazzling athleticism and excitement. And then it ends, all falling confetti and tearful speeches.

Of course, that's been true in some sense for years, as Simmons transformed from the most famous sportswriter in the country to a professional gabber best known for his podcast and two-year stint on NBA Countdown, and as an editorial manager with an extraordinary eye for talent. In four years at the helm of the now-defunct Grantland, Simmons hired America's best film critic (Wesley Morris) and best basketball writer (Zach Lowe) — not to mention a gaggle of correspondents of such superior talents (Molly Lambert! Brian Phillips! Rembert Browne!) that reading their work, as a fellow writer, can invite an existential crisis.

In this sense, Simmons' partnership with HBO, the standard-bearer for "prestige TV" since the days of The Sopranos, is an extension of the reputation he built in his final years at ESPN — where, in addition to founding Grantland, he co-created 30 for 30, the docuseries that brought the bold-faced names of independent American cinema (Albert Maysles, Ava DuVernay, John Singleton, Ryan Fleck) to the same network as Monday Night Football. But the debut tonight of Simmons' weekly talk show, Any Given Wednesday — not to mention HBO's minority stake in the Bill Simmons Media Group, home to his eponymous podcast and his new website, The Ringer— also signals a new stage in a much longer evolution.

The question is, if Bill Simmons is no longer The Sports Guy, who is he?

In his popular column, which originated at AOL's Digital City Boston before moving to ESPN in 2001, Simmons developed the distinctive voice of sportswriting's digital age, abandoning box scores and coaches' stratagems for densely allusive rambles that acknowledged sports' place in, and as, popular culture. (One early "Mailbag" column covered, among other topics, Bud Collins and NBC's "Breakfast at Wimbledon" theme music; Caddyshack and the 14-club rule; Miami Vice; Isaiah Thomas' exclusion from the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team; and the E! True Hollywood Story on Beverly Hills 90210.) The result was writing that mimicked the sound of scraping barstools and sniping across the beer pong table — raw, opinionated, and funny (in a fratty way). At a time when people talked about whether they'd have a beer with one or another presidential candidate, Simmons was the famous guy who most guys I knew actually wanted to have a beer with.

Simmons recognized that fandom itself is a form of entertainment, that the theories, agonies, ecstasies, insults, and arguments that accompany sports — or, for that matter, music, movies, TV, and comic books — are as fundamental to the experience as touchdowns and shot clocks, face-offs and strikeouts. Even now, more than a decade later, Simmons' column on "The Snow Game" summons what can only be described as sense memories: The thrum of the end zone at the old Foxboro Stadium; the feel of fresh snow in a New England winter; the taste of Budweiser and buffalo wings on Sunday afternoons. His knowledge neared encyclopedic levels, his scattershot thoughts defied conventional wisdom, and Simmons became The Sports Guy because he understood the fellowship of fans.

That Simmons no longer musters the same magic has been the most disappointing, if inevitable, consequence of his success. He has learned, in the manner of executives and editors-in-chief since time immemorial, to delegate, and The Ringer, if not yet "the new Grantland," has loads of terrific reporters, critics, and commentators in its employ. But the man himself is now closer kin to the subjects of his column, the athletes and celebrities, than he is to its readers, the fans. After hobnobbing on The Bill Simmons Podcast with Michael B. Jordan, David Duchovny, and Louis C.K., bantering with his college buddies JackO and Joe House to discuss Deflategate and the NBA trade deadline suggests at least a whiff of affectation.

The issue is not that Simmons has created a public persona. Anyone with a Facebook page, Twitter handle, or Instagram account is, at some level, performing for an audience. And for the famous, cultivating a "personal brand" is a path to profit and a form of self-protection. The issue is that the "Bill Simmons" of HBO's "I Believe" spots is meant to be the same "snarky asshole" with a strong point of view as the Bill Simmons firing spitballs from Page 2. But he comes off instead as a smug, calculated contrarian, a human content farm for hot takes. Simmons made his name by being, or least seeming, "authentic." The Regular Joe with the media empire and the multimillion-dollar contract is not the role he was born to play.

None of that is to say Simmons' evolution from Sports Guy to star is bad. He's carved out a much-needed space for idiosyncratic, artful sports journalism and cultural criticism, first at Grantland and 30 for 30 and now at The Ringer. We're all better for it. Along the way, though, Simmons has lost something.

As a columnist, Simmons seemed to be writing to us as much as he was writing for us. His column was an ongoing correspondence among fans. Now he's made us into mere flies on the wall, hoping to catch a few crumbs of wisdom from his shaggy, strangely enervating exchanges with Malcolm Gladwell or Chuck Klosterman, despite the occasional three-minute tangent on the weather in Winnipeg. And for all the elbows Simmons and JackO throw at sports talk radio, that's more or less what The Bill Simmons Podcast sounds like. HBO's advertisements for Any Given Wednesday are simply the logical end point of the metamorphosis: Opinion decoupled from argument, the conversation replaced by a sermon.

More self-important than self-aware, more cliquish than convivial, this is Simmons with the blinders on, and in the context of his increasing clout, it's a development not without consequence. For instance, in the first 106 episodes of his podcast, Simmons has had women on a mere seven times; the first guests scheduled for his TV show are Charles Barkley and Ben Affleck. If Any Given Wednesday is to be as essential to the discussion of sports, culture, and technology as John Oliver's Last Week Tonight has been to politics and policymaking, Simmons can't see the creative freedom he's long craved as license to throw a semi-permanent sausage party. There's nothing novel in navel-gazing.

We might, of course, have seen this coming. By the time he welcomed us to Grantland in 2011, Simmons' point of reference was not the smell of piss at the old Foxboro Stadium, but the scent of "stale champagne" on the road home to Hollywood, the perspective not of the fan but of the star, evolving, by degrees, out of our grasp. No one can fault Simmons for seizing the opportunities he earned in his stint as The Sports Guy, but neither can one dismiss the suspicion that fame has spoiled the distinctive relationship he once forged with his audience, sitting side-by-side at the bar. As an astute observer once said of Entourage, which follows a nobody from the Northeast and his closest buddies on the rise to prominence on the West Coast:

In every episode, [Jeremy] Piven's agent inadvertently demonstrates how the show squandered a rare chance — they could have parodied celebrities and posses in the same vicious way. Instead, they chose to glorify them — there's the cool house, the fancy cars, the celeb cameos, the kickin' theme song, and every show seems to end with them sitting or standing together, gazing out to an ocean or a skyline. We get it, we get it. They're living the life. The kids from Queens made it. [ESPN]

The writer? Bill Simmons.

Any Given Wednesday premieres Wednesday, June 22 at 10 p.m. ET on HBO.

Have you ever made a split-second decision about what to order at a restaurant because your waiter was standing expectantly by the table? If what you settled on was only mediocre (you should never have ordered that catfish!), would it help if your dining companions released a comprehensive analysis the next morning of all the other menu options you could've chosen instead, and posted that post-mortem online for the world to see? Of course not — and it certainly wouldn't make last night's bland fish dinner taste any better.

So it's no surprise that last week, the National Basketball Association's referees union issued a statement asking the league to stop releasing its Last Two Minutes reports, which review the officiating decisions of the final minutes of close games and determine — via a breakdown made public the following morning — whether mistakes were made. The annotated play-by-play of the final minutes of the game lists each "officiated event" and determines it was either a correct call, an incorrect call, a correct non-call, or an incorrect non-call.

To understand why these reports are so problematic, take this example from a contested game in this year's Western Conference Semifinals between the San Antonio Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Thunder edged the Spurs 98-97 in San Antonio to even the series at one game apiece and steal homecourt advantage. It was a critical, series-changing game after the Spurs had thoroughly embarrassed the Thunder in a Game 1 blowout. The L2M report for Game 2 revealed five separate incorrect non-calls in the last play of the game, including a missed shooting foul committed against Spurs forward LaMarcus Aldridge during his last-second shot attempt at the rim. Had officials called the foul for Aldridge (a career 80 percent free throw shooter), he would've been awarded two free throws that could've either tied the game or taken the lead. But they didn't, so he didn't, and the Spurs went on to lose the series in six games.

When the NBA implemented this review program in February 2015, the stated goal was to increase transparency in officiating. But the reports — and the principle behind them — are actually ruining the game. Accountability sounds nice, but there's a crucial caveat: The L2M reports have no bearing on actually changing any outcomes. What's done is done, and the only thing left to offer to the wronged team is righteous indignation.

What's more, the initiative places an undue amount of pressure on officials in tight games. While they should be focusing on making the right call in the moment, the knowledge that their actions will be dissected in a public forum the next day adds another anxiety-making element in deciding whether to blow the whistle. Think you see some deliberate, malicious follow-through on that hard foul at the rim? You'd better be sure you're ready to award that flagrant foul, or face the morning-after consequences. If officials are supposed to protect the sanctity of the game and the safety of its players, re-litigating every meaningful call in the court of public opinion the next morning is hardly the way to keep the objective motivations in focus.

Worse still is when this obsessive need for technical perfection makes the game actively worse. In Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday night, referees paused the action on at least three separate occasions to review a play and decide whether the foul in question was a flagrant foul — which awards the fouled team two free throws as well as possession — or a common foul. League rules previously dictated that instant replay could only be used to review a foul call if the infraction had been called flagrant when it occurred, but the NBA changed those conditions last year, allowing for fouls that had originally been called common fouls to be upgraded to flagrant after the viewing of an instant replay.

Some may say that perfection and consistency are worth the pain of pausing game play and subjecting refs to next-day castigation — that getting calls by-the-rulebook right is what matters most in the end. But allowing referees to frequently interrupt to consult an instant replay, disrupting the momentum and often-beautiful flow of basketball — especially when some of the league's most dynamic offensive players are on the court — is not worth this price. Basketball is fast-paced, near-constant motion, with 10 moving parts on the floor at any given moment. To allow each interaction between players to be reviewed both instantaneously and then, if the game was close, in the next day's L2M report, takes the impressive athleticism and skill inherent to the game out of the equation. It turns basketball from a joy to a grind.

"The league's actions to promote so-called transparency will cause more harm than good for the officials and the game," read the National Basketball Referees Association's statement calling for the end of the L2M reports. "If every possible infraction were to be called, the game would be unwatchable and would cease to exist as a form of entertainment in this country."

The refs are right.

To call every single infraction in fear of being outed for the non-call the next day is ruinous, as is setting the precedent that every single moment of physical contact can be subject to review. Would you rather watch LeBron James drive hard to the hole and slam in a thrilling dunk, or be whistled on every other possession for traveling? Would you rather watch Draymond Green fill up the stat sheet while playing every position, or sit out a Finals game because the league reviewed tape and retroactively upgraded one of his common fouls to a flagrant foul, resulting in a one-game suspension?

For the sake of the sport, let the officials be in charge of their own whistles, and let the players play.

Luana and Lohaynny Vicente first picked up rackets as kids growing up in Rio de Janeiro. Today, the sisters are dominating the sport on the world stage.

Lohaynny (left) and her sister Luana in Chacrinha favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 4, 2016. | (REUTERS/Nacho Doce)

Luana celebrates her seventh birthday with her sister Lohaynny in Chacrinha favela in Rio de Janeiro in 2001. | (Courtesy of Vicente de Oliveira Family/Handout via REUTERS)

The sisters' early childhood was an unsettled one. Their father was a drug dealer and often moved the family around to evade police or gangs. After he died in a shootout with police, their mother moved the girls to the northern part of the city for a fresh start. It was there that the girls, aged 4 and 6, were first introduced to badminton by a coach who had set up a community program for neighborhood kids. The girls were quickly hooked.

In 2015, they won the silver medal in badminton doubles at the Pan American Games in Toronto. And this year, Lohaynny qualified to compete in singles badminton at the Summer Olympics, which starts Aug. 5, in their hometown.

"It's the first time Brazil will compete in Olympic badminton," Lohaynny told Reuters, "and I am the first woman chosen to compete." Below, check out these badass badminton players in action.

Lohaynny warms up before a game at the 31st Brazil International Badminton Cup in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on March 11, 2016. | (REUTERS/Nacho Doce)

Russian professional tennis player Maria Sharapova has been suspended for two years for an anti-doping rule violation, the International Tennis Federation announced Wednesday. Her "period of ineligibility" will be backdated to Jan. 26, 2016, the day Sharapova tested positive for the heart disease drug, meldonium, at the Australian Open.

Sharapova responded to the announcement almost immediately with a public statement saying that she would not accept the "unfairly harsh" suspension and that she planned to appeal the decision. She has maintained that she did not intentionally seek the blood flow-boosting drug for performance enhancement, but for health issues:

British Olympian Greg Rutherford isn't letting the Zika virus stop him from participating in this summer's Rio Games, but he is taking extra precautions before he heads to Brazil. The gold medalist has decided that, before he heads to the Games to defend his long jump title, he will freeze his sperm to ensure that he and his partner can have more children without worrying about the Zika virus' potential effects. The mosquito-borne virus has been associated with birth defects and developmental problems in infants.

"We'd love to have more children and, with research in its infancy, I wouldn't want to put myself in a situation which could have been prevented," Rutherford's partner, Susie Verrill, said. Neither Verrill nor the couple's son, Milo, will attend the Games due to Zika concerns.

Rutherford is far from the only Olympic athlete who has raised concerns over the Zika virus. American cyclist Tejay van Garderen, as well as golfers Vijay Singh of Fiji, Louis Oosthuizen and Charl Schwartzel of South Africa, and Australia's Marc Leishman and Adam Scott, have all decided not to participate because of the disease's prevalence in Brazil. CNN reports that South Korea's athletes will be wearing tracksuits "infused with insect repellent" throughout the Games to keep mosquitoes at bay.